Check to the Head

The IIHF have announced their World Championships All-Star team completely made up out of medal winners.

The IIHF winners for the 2007 World Championship:

BEST GOALIE - Kari Lehtonen (FIN) - They gave this award to Lehtonen to stop it from being a Russian sweep of the tournaments best players. Lehtonen finished 3rd in the stats for netminders behind Cam Ward (2nd) and Russia's Alexander Eremenko (1st). Lehtoned put up a 91.30% and a GAA of 1.93. I guess he was given the prize as his Finnish side made it through to the finals or maybe it was done to keep the NHLers happy. The Russian goalie Eremenko who topped the tables with an impressive save percentage of 95.74% and a GAA of 0.98 played in Russia's nine games. He surely should have won the award.


BEST DEFENSEMAN - Andrei Markov (RUS) Totalled 3+5 for 8 points, joint 2nd places for defensemen. He finished the tournament with +5 a better +/- number than the top points scoring D-man Dick Tarnstrom (1+8).

BEST FORWARD - Aleksei Morozov (RUS) Arguably the best player outside of the NHL scored 8+5 for 13 points from the 7 games he played in. His 8 goals scored were enough to bag him the scorers crown but Swedens Johan Davidsson ended up the tournaments top points scorer beating Morozov by just one point. The Swede scored 7+7


The media All-Star Team was also announced:

Goal: Kari Lehtonen (FIN)
Defense: Petteri Nummelin (FIN), Andrei Markov (RUS)
Forward: Aleksei Morozov(RUS), Evgeny Malkin (RUS), Rick Nash (CAN)

Tournament MVP: Rick Nash - The Canadian scored twice in the final to take home the gold medal that performance probably bagged him the gong. Matthew Lombardi could easily have taken the award too. He had a great tournament, scoring some big goals plus he topped Canada's scoring stats with 6+4.

Incidentally three of the Media's All-Star team players had to miss their team's final games due to injury: Morozov, Markov and Nummelin.