When it comes to decisions, the hard ones are usually when the choice is between good options. Bill Guerin has too many positive options and Golden Knights defenseman Noah Hanifin seems intent on adding to that headache.
Guerin has a long list of very good defensemen to choose from for his Team USA roster. Four Nations Faceoff rosters will be announced on Dec. 2 and his play of late has pushed Hanifin into the conversation.
The buzzword for management groups is ‘watchlist.’ Teams have their locks and then a group of players they are monitoring to fill the remaining positions. Hanifin is a watchlist player for Team USA.
Quinn Hughes, Adam Fox and Charlie McAvoy have already been named to the American blueline.
Then comes a list of players still needing to push themselves over the line. Jaccob Slavin, Brock Faber, Zach Werenski, Jake Sanderson, John Carlson and K’Andre Miller are all regularly mentioned as strong possibilities. Hanifin was considered a longshot entering the NHL season but those odds continue to improve for the Boston native.
Guerin was interviewed by NHL.com recently and discussed the difficulty of picking when the field is filled with excellence.
“We find ourselves laughing sometimes because we’ve been nitpicking over players we’d all kill to have on our NHL rosters. I mean, we’ll be looking over guys saying, ‘He does this, he does this’ while, in reality, we’d kill to have that guy on our [NHL] teams, you know what I mean?,” said Guerin. “The depth is incredible. And this is something we’ve been talking about the whole time about Canada, that they can put two teams out. Well, we’re kind of at that stage ourselves where we could put out multiple teams that are really good. It’s unbelievable.”
Hanifin has seven points in his last nine games and is a plus nine over that stretch. On Wednesday he scored a pair of third period goals to push his Vegas team over the Edmonton Oilers with the entire hockey world watching a marquee matchup between two Western Conference behemoths.
