Lias Andersson has received a lot of backlash for his medal toss after the World Junior gold-medal game in January and now the IIHF seems dead-set on making sure he is punished.
Earlier in the week, an announcement was released stating that Andersson would be suspended for four World Juniors games in 2019. There were a lot of different reactions to this on all sides of the spectrum of the argument around the silver-medal toss, but one of them ended up making the most sense: It won’t matter.
Andersson won’t play in next year’s WJC, so the suspension wasn’t really relevant – so the IIHF changed it. He will play in this year's tournament but his suspension has been changed to impact him in next year's World Championship.
This means if he plays on next year's team, he'll miss four of six round-robin games.
The kid was just upset in the moment. It was already weird to suspend someone for something four months after it happened, but to then go back on the initial suspension and a statement that you made initially just seems wishy-washy. Here was the initial tweet stating that it would only impact their ability to play in Junior events.
This year's tournament starts today and should be one of the best in recent years with Connor McDavid, Mat Barzal, Patrick Kane, Johnny Gaudreau and many other top NHL players joining their countries.
