Nobody on the Canadian or American rosters at the 2018 IIHF world men’s hockey championships in Denmark ever played for teams in St. John’s, but there are a half dozen associated with European entries — five players and a coach — who can make that claim.
Two of those players are with Germany.
German goaltender Timo Pielmeier was the starting netminder in 2007-08 for the St. John’s Fog Devils of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, getting that nod ahead of current St. Louis Blues No. 1 puckstopper Jake Allen. Markus Eisenschmid, a forward for Germany, skated with American Hockey League’s St. John’s IceCaps for two seasons when that team was the farm club of the Montreal Canadiens.
Two of Eisenschmid’s teammates on the Canadiens-affiliated IceCaps — forwards Sven Andrighetto of Switzerland and Jacob de la Rose of Sweden — are also competing in this world tourney. So is Latvian defenceman Ralfs Freiberg, who played a handful of games for the version of the IceCaps that was affiliated with the Winnipeg Jets.
The coach on our list is former St. John’s Maple Leaf centre Alexei Kudashov, who is an assistant on the Russian staff headed up by Ilya Vorobiev. The 46-year-old Kudashov played over 100 games for the AHL Leafs after coming over from Russia as a Toronto draft pick in the mid 1990s and was the leading score for St. John’s (79 points on 25 goals and 54 assists) in 1994-95.
Four of the six made it to the National Hockey League.
Andrighetto and de la Rose played with the Colorado Avalanche and Montreal Canadiens, respectively, this past season. Kudashov appeared in 25 NHL games, all with Toronto, before heading back to Europe and a long career in leagues over there, mainly in Russia. And Pielmeier got into one NHL contest, playing 40 minutes for the Anaheim Ducks in 2010-11. A couple of years later, Pielmeier was back in Germany, where he is with ERC Ingolstadt in the DEL, that country’s elite circuit.
Freiberg never got further than those few games with the IceCaps in 2014-15 after coming out of Bowling Green University and has spent the last couple of years in Europe, including last season in the Czech Elite League.
Eisenschmid, who played junior hockey in Canada, recently completed his third season as a Montreal farmhand (with the Laval Rocket), but has never seen any action with the big club.
This is the first world championship for Eisenschmid and de la Rose, but all the others with a St. John’s connection have previously played in the tournament.
Three — Kudashov (1994), Freiberg (2014) and Pielmeier (2018) — have played in Olympic Games , with Pielmeier coming away with a silver medal after Germany’s surprise performance in Pyeongchang.
All six have another shared connection besides having played for teams in St. John’s in that hey all have represented their countries at world junior championships.
Twitter: @telysports
