View Single Post
Old 02-25-2024, 10:25 AM   #85
Carman Bulldog
College Benchwarmer
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Canada
So the Canadian women's national hockey team would regularly play against Midget AAA boys (mostly in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia) in their Olympic prep years and went 58-46-5 over the four Olympic years between 2006 and 2018. In 2022, they stepped up and played Junior A and went 0-5 getting outscored 30-2.

The national team is made up of the twenty or so best female hockey players of any age in Canada. Many of these women start playing at the age of 4 or 5, play several years on boys teams and then move on to girls and women's teams. Midget AAA boys are the best 15,16 and 17 year-olds playing U17; the very best 16 and 17 year-olds though are already playing Junior, which is 16-20. Junior A is a level below Major Junior. It is very rare for anyone playing Junior A to make it to the NHL, the exception usually being those that play Junior A at 16 or 17 because they want to go the college route. The vast majority of players that go on to play in the NHL play at the Major Junior level and not Junior A.

So I think the best way to equate this would be something like the 2020 US women's Olympic basketball team being very competitive with 11th grade AAU team's in Florida and then stepping up and getting crushed at the DII college level. That's basically the level of where elite women athletes are at in comparison to men.
Carman Bulldog is offline   Reply With Quote