What strengths and weaknesses does Canada have with their current roster?

Whenever it’s best-on-best, everyone looks at Canada to see what they’ll do.

Canada is coming into the men’s tournament at the Winter Olympics with the expectation of competing for the gold medal. The country is just a year removed from winning the 4 Nations Face-Off, with head coach Jon Cooper bringing back most of the same group from that team.

There are a lot of reasons to like Canada’s roster head into Milan, as it looks to win a fourth gold medal in the “NHL era” of the Winter Games.

On Monday’s edition of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Steve Peters joined Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton to lay out Canada’s strengths and weaknesses heading into the tournament.

Steve Peters: It is about their speed, and it’s about their activity in the offensive zone. Their movement creates confusion in the offensive zone, but it’s about their team speed, their defensemen getting up in their rush. They’re coming with four men all the time. Their ability to create turnovers in the defensive zone and use team speed to get the other way. It’s not just MacKinnon and McDavid. There’s Sidney Crosby breaking up the ice and getting in as the late man. Tight back-checking. Turn those plays over in the neutral zone. Team speed going the other way. Canada’s the fastest team in this tournament from first line to fourth line. Everybody can play like this….This is what Canada’s game is. The ability for everybody to drive the net. Dangerous off the rush.

But, if you turn the puck over and you have four men up in the rush just off the blue line…Canada has to manage the puck at both blue lines. That can be a concern.

One of the weaknesses – they had a hard time getting the puck out of the zone. They had a hard time turning pucks over on their breakouts and allowing their opponents to come back at them. Nobody better at it than the United States. Hard on the forecheck. Hard to the net. Canada’s got to get better at that. They’ve got to defend the area in front of [Jordan] Binnington. They’ve got to be bigger and stronger in front of that blue paint. They have skilled defensemen. They need their defensemen to be able to push those big American forwards out of that blue paint area.

You can watch the full segment and entire episode here…