The World Junior Championship’s opening round finishes today and the United States has not yet been awarded the gold medal. Investigation by Sleeping Giant’s band of patriots confirms that the US team has been eliminated from the medal round by anti-American factions operating at the highest level of the IIHF.

Sleeping Giant can confirm large payments of monopoly money and beaver pelts to officials at the IIHF to make this disappointing event possible. In response to this travesty the US has considered moving to Division 1 and depriving TSN of the valuable American TV audience.

And I’ll tell you what we do with humble pie in America: we knock that shit on the floor and get to work making a pie made entirely out of awesome goals.

It shouldn’t surprise you then that up North they’re occupying themselves idolizing every 13 year old half-talent they can get their hands on. American spies gave their lives to acquire this video, and were likely tortured to death by being forced to watch Little Mosque on the Prairie while being fed only Canada’s idea of Mexican food:

Laugh it up Canada. We hear Charlie Coyle only left Boston University for the QMJHL to learn your customs, to blend in before delivering the final strike.

To the surprise of zero people on the planet the US of A opened its 2011-12 World Junior Championships campaign with a stunningly easy victory over Denmark.

Not that it looked so good through the first 20 minutes. The US, presumably because it felt so badly that it was being forced by archaic IIHF rules to beat a team so poor as the Danes, flatly refused to make an even cursory effort at killing penalties. But because the Americans are clearly the most gentlemanly and cool team in the tournament, they were only able to convince the refs to give the Danes three power plays. So that was Denmark’s three goals accounted for.

Now let’s focus on America’s 11.

The ease with which the USA, led by Charlie Coyle’s hat trick, scored its goals tonight was appalling. It was nice of the Danes to kick the third one into their own net in an effort to appease their American superiors, but it was also fruitless and for naught because in international competition, you have to be at least a little cutthroat since differential counts for a lot.

Three goals in the first period was a fine amount — puts you on pace for nine — but the Danes’ insistence on cheating (see the Macho Man-esque flying elbow to Kevin Gravel’s defenseless noggin in the second period) sparked a bit of rage and six goals later it was 9-2 through 40 minutes.

Obviously the US dialed it back in the third period and only scored twice, which was fair enough. The envious Canadians that packed Rexall Place for lack of anything better to do in their pathetic lives, who had spent the game’s opening minutes booing everything positive the US did (or, everything the US did, since it’s all positive), had made a hasty retreat once it was clear the game was well in hand. The US thrives on playing in front of hostile crowds, and because every crowd is hostile due to their petty jealousy, it can sometimes be difficult to really get up the type of killer instinct that typifies the American game. Along those same lines, the Danish team backed down from trying to compete with the Americans physically because they were afraid of literally being beaten to death by Emerson Etem.

The important thing here, though, isn’t the final score. Winning 11-3 is fine, but it was better that the US used the second period as a showcase of its real and awesome power. Imagine if it wanted to play like that for a full 60.

If we weren’t American (the horror!) we’d be terrified.

In other, far less important action no one who matters cared about:

CANADA (booooooo) 8, FINLAND 1

Mark Stone had a hat trick and an assist in Canada’s breezy win over Finland in the tournament’s opening game, but we at the Sleeping Giant sincerely hope that the IIHF will launch a full investigation into the matter.

Just look at this guy:

We’re not sure how much the Canadian team is sinking into the team’s makeup budget, but the fake acne trying to make him look like a teenager just isn’t convincing. Mark Stone isn’t a day under 30.

This kind of shameful behavior isn’t atypical, of course. Canada has been known to revel in its poor sportsmanship (i.e. playing the Canadian national anthem — imaginatively entitled “O Canada!” — prior to the game, and not Finland’s) but this is some of the worst we’ve yet seen.

Also in this game, Devante Smith-Pelly fractured his foot and will miss the remainder of the tournament so now you can fully expect that Canadian media to pin the team’s eventual Hindenburg-type disastrous meltdown on that.

Sweden 9, Latvia 4

Don’t let this score fool you. Latvia scored four goals on just 13 shots against Sweden’s Johan Gustafsson. Four on 13! Clearly some problems to sort out there. On the other hand, Max Friberg took time out from being in the E Street Band to score four for the winners.

Russia 3, Switzerland 0

The Russians didn’t allow a single goal and everyone in Switzerland wept into their fondue pots but no one else noticed or cared.

…

And finally, here is a nice email we received from some great Americans who know a great blog when they see one:

Thought you’d be getting a lot of hate mail in the next few days… or maybe you get hate mail all the time. haha. Either way, a few of my friends and I went to see American hero Tyler Johnson play in Hershey last week and made a poster in honor of your amazing blog. Thought I’d send it along for you to take a look at.

GO USA!

Go USA indeed.

One of the many things that distinguishes handsome and intelligent Americans from our sun starved neighbors to the North is our charity.

As the Canadians lick their chops at the possibility of watching their team score eleven goals against a team from a country that’s never heard of hockey we at the Sleeping Giant are making a plea for you to help our cause.

Lambert and I worked with Right to Play last year during the playoffs when we became mercenary bloggers. They’re a charity that raises money so that children in places somehow worse than Canada can play sports. Some programs bring kids together across sociopolitical lines. Some programs just let kids be kids.

It sounds cheesy and overwrought but in this season where we all hope to get a new iPad or a plasma TV realize that donating five dollars to charity might let a child experience the simple joy of kicking a ball.

Donate to Right to Play

Despite our best efforts we know some of you awful Canadians have begun infiltrating our fortress of American values and rubber band noises only to crow about how one time in 1897 your team won Gold when the Americans weren’t invited to the tournament but that’s ok we have a plan for you too:

Bourne Family & Friends

Justin Bourne from the Score’s Backhand Shelf was lucky enough to spend time with a real American on Friday night. His brother Jeff came along. Jeff was born with spina bifida and their charity raises funds to support research on this disease.

Save your Right to Play receipts Americans. We’ll tally the totals and prove that American fans are both more smarter and more charitabler than Canada.

Misunderstood Visentin was allowed only 30 minutes in net before getting the comically oversized Vaudeville hook in the second period against a team playing to win a tin of pickled goldfish.

Realistically who could expect Visentin to stop pucks behind a defense that was excused from school so that they could hit people smaller than themselves and repair farm equipment?

That Visentin made any saves at all while the scrappy Canadians began pulling on their bootstraps against a Swedish team described as one of the best two Scandanavian teams in the tournament speaks to his mental toughness and ability to ignore the constantly flashing red lights behind his net.

Mark Visentin doesn’t worry about any of that because Mark Visentin is a gamer. He’s a kid who deserves the full support of the Sleeping Giant and he’s going to have it.

On this Christmas Eve while thanking our white Christian God for the gift of being born into an upper middle class family and giving us professional wrestling maybe throw a third “big up” to Canada’s Mark Visentin.

Well-known and beloved American hero Justin Faulk, currently the greatest player in Carolina Hurricanes history, wanted desperately to represent his country at this upcoming World Junior Championships. So badly, in fact, that he was actually willing to go to Canada to do it.

But nefarious and petty Carolina general manager Jim Rutherford had other ideas.

Rutherford, who it will surprise you not at all to learn is from Ontario, insists that Faulk stay with his club team in a bald-faced and base attempt to reduce America’s chance to win, and increase Canada’s, as though such a thing were mathematically possible. It should be noted, too, that Rutherford’s team is owned also by Peter Karmanos, an American who also controls an OHL franchise and is therefore at least a Canadian sympathizer and has a financial interest in seeing the Canadian enemy succeed.

And then there’s this, taken from Rutherford’s bio on the Carolina website: “Rutherford played for Team Canada in the World Championships in Vienna in 1977 and Moscow in 1979.” This is through-the-looking-glass stuff.

We’re sure if Canada had a government that was in any way capable of engineering a conspiracy large enough to unseat something as mighty as USA Hockey, it would be involved as well. But since Stephen Harper’s office is literally an ice fishing hut on Lake Louise that, if we’re being honest, looks a bit worse for wear these days, we know this cannot be the case.

Jesse “The Body” Ventura once said, “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.” And Canada, knowing that the first option is impossible and the second inevitable, has very clearly taken the third to heart.

Today Hockey Canada announced the final 22-man roster for its World Junior Championship team in an annual tradition known as cut day, in which the team rids itself of all players who exhibit literacy above a third-grade level.

Now, we have this same day here in the U.S., of course, but it’s not treated like a big deal because we in this, The Greatest Country In The History of the World, have a little bit of something no Canadian has ever been born with: respect and decorum.

This is, to be sure, a hard day for all players who aspire to play the game at an elite level: they are essentially being told that they aren’t one of the 22 best players in their country —and, given that this is Canada we’re talking about, and there are about 195 other countries right now, that means they’re not in the world’s top 4,290 players — and then are asked to go face a literal army of reporters all ready to grill them about their horrible failure as human beings.

Okay, that sounds harsh, but it’s true to an extent. In Canada, if you’re a hockey player, your quality as a person (especially if you’re eligible for the U20 squad) only goes as far as your ability to make the team. Don’t make the cut? Prepare to have six dozen microphones shoved in your face to dissect exactly how you feel about it from glaring reporters, all of whom firmly believe that you have shamed yourself, your family and your nation.

“Soarry kid,” they all seem to say as a hivemind, “but it’s back to Moosefart, Manitoba, for you. And frankly it’s better than you deserve, eh? You make us sick.”

Hockey Canada doesn’t announce these cuts in a press conference format, either, so the ghoulish weirdos at TSN, Rogers SportsNet and CBC all camp out in the lobby of a hotel and surround every kid that got 86′d the second he steps off the elevator. And let’s be honest, if the U.S. were to fetishize anything the way Canadians do their World Junior team, you’d have nothing but a series of snooty canucks looking down their noses and saying, “This is why everyone hates America.”

It’s a ghastly practice by a country that we allow to share a border with us, and one that no one seems to have any particular problem with. But perhaps worse than the media’s handling of the situation which, again, is ghastly, is how Hockey Canada uses this day as a way to advance a more nefarious agenda.

Phil Di Giuseppe was among today’s cuts, which is notable in that he was one of just two camp invitees currently playing NCAA hockey here in the States (he for the Michigan Wolverines and the other, Jaden Schwartz, for Colorado College). When he went, everyone made it out to be one of those “He was so close, but he’ll be back next year,” scenarios, leaving unspoken the implicit caveat that the being back next year is contingent upon his leaving the NCAA system for the CHL. It’s not the first time and certainly won’t be the last that Hockey Canada has ALLEGEDLY stooped this low, asking an NCAA player to forego his college education (and go back his agreement with the school giving him a scholarship). They MAY have done it with Jamie Oleksiak, who despite being an unbelievable player for Northeastern University last year, didn’t get a sniff from Hockey Canada until he jumped to the Saginaw Spirit of the OHL. And they MIGHT have done it with Louis LeBlanc, who quit after a year at Harvard (HARVARD!) to play for the Montreal Juniors.

Shockingly (see also: not shockingly), both players made Canada’s team the year after getting cut and — ahem — choosing to focus more on their hockey development than their academic pursuits. Schwartz, luckily for him, was as slam-dunk a candidate to make this team as currently exists, and so lean on him though Hockey Canada COULD HAVE, they really didn’t have that kind of leverage.

And it should be noted here that USA Hockey would never stoop to this type of base gamesmanship in the war between college hockey and major juniors: its preliminary roster (you’ll notice it’s not down to 22 players yet, since NCAA student-athletes are currently taking finals, a thing CHL players consider a laughable afterthought) has a healthy mix of both CHL and NCAA players. That’s because USA Hockey isn’t about to politicize the lives and potential careers of 30-something young men for the sake of a tournament it’s going to win easily.

That’s class. Hockey Canada wouldn’t know anything about class anyway, and neither would its numerous CHL players.

Uh oh.