USA Orientation Camp: Caufield invited, but its place at the Games is far from guaranteed

Dose
Crédit: Cole Caufield celebrates goal with Montreal Canadiens.

Cole Caufield has been invited to the U.S. Olympic orientation camp, and to see his talent and hard work recognized in this way is good news in itself, especially when you consider his last season (70 points, including 37 goals) with the Canadiens.

But the small forward’s place on the team is far from guaranteed, in fact. Looking at the guest players, it’s easy to see that there’s lots and lots of talent in the forward group. And it makes you wonder if Caufield has what it takes to surpass the likes of..

  • Matt Boldy
  • Jason Robertson
  • Jake Guentzel
  • Jack Hughes
  • Auston Matthews
  • Tage Thompson
  • Brady Tkachuk
  • Matthew Tkachuk
  • Clayton Keller
  • J.T. Miller
  • Jack Eichel
  • Kyle Connor
  • Patrick Kane

Right here, we find 13 high-quality forwards. I’m not saying that Caufield isn’t a good player: I’m just saying that he’ll have to work extremely, but extremely hard to prove himself…

[content-ads] In the photo above, we can also see that Lane Hutson is not among the defensemen invited to the camp in question.But we knew that: Tony Marinaro announced it a few weeks ago.

💪

Getting back to Caufield, there are two things that could help him make the U.S. team for the next Olympics. He has to be really dominant at orientation camp to open the eyes of management… All in all, no player is immune to injury (although we never wish it on anyone) and maybe that can change things between now and the competition too. That said, we know that “small” players are often overlooked by nations for tournaments like this… and maybe that explains why Lane Hutson wasn’t even invited by the USA to the camp in question. It’ll be interesting to see what the States’ line-up looks like, I suspect… [spacer title=’Overtime’] – Sick.

– Great. #Not

– He had a great NBA career.

– Oh yeah?