The opening day of the 2026 World Junior Championship on Friday, Dec. 26, was full of goals, especially when USA took on Germany that evening. It was a loud arena in St. Paul, Minnesota, as the USA looked to win gold for a third consecutive year. They started out strong, and even though Germany tried to fight back, USA kept scoring.
It looked close at the beginning of the second period, but by the end, USA had pulled back to a three-goal lead, and Germany struggled to get any scoring going. The three goal second period for USA ended the scoring for the game as USA took the win 6-3 over Germany. In this article, we’ll take a look at a few takeaways for the USA, starting with their goal scoring.
USA Goals Galore
There was no shortage of goals for USA as they had five different goal scorers, with one player getting two goals, and that was Will Zellers. The other goal scorers were Max Plante, Chase Reid, Will Horcoff, and Cole Eiserman. The one thing these scorers had in common was the way they scored. Quite a few of the goals were rebounds that were knocked in after the initial shot was saved.
That truly shows USA knows how to crash the net and wait for things to happen. It doesn’t hurt that they also have some snipers on their team, which is how the shots made it there in the first place, and a few of the goals were strong shots that blew past the goaltender as well. Regardless of how the goals went in, USA had scorers all throughout their lineup, and it paid off.
“Yeah, it’s what we talk about, it’s good hockey, that’s what we’re good at. Play fast, play hard, you see not even that one, just other ones like Spell (Spellacy) and Zellers and McMorrow just playing hard, playing below it, hard on the puck, good things happen,” said Brodie Ziemer on how the forecheck got results.
USA’s Goaltender Strong
USA came out strong, and although Germany fought back, they weren’t able to overtake the USA, and part of that was because of the goaltending of Caleb Heil. He had his share of struggles just like the rest of his teammates, but they locked it down and came out with the win.
Heil made some big saves that allowed his teammates to retake the lead and get the win. He made 18 saves on 21 shots, so he wasn’t tested a lot, but enough that he needed to be on top of his game. He didn’t face quite as much as his German counterpart, however, who faced 47 shots on goal.
“I didn’t think it was our cleanest game, I don’t think it was my cleanest game either, but at the end of the day, we got the job done and got the win,” said Heil when asked about what he saw out there.
USA is the Team to Beat
Obviously, after winning back-to-back gold medals, USA was going to be the team to beat when the tournament opened up, and they proved that with their strong performance against Germany. Of course, they had their stumbles when Germany attempted to climb back in after USA took a three-goal lead, but they put their heads down and pushed forward.
USA knows they have to be better if they want to win gold again, but it’s also important to remember this is just the first game of the tournament, and it takes a little time for these guys to fully settle in. There’s a lot of tournament left and a lot of time for them to improve their game as time goes on.
Related: Guide to the 2026 World Junior Championship
“It was a good game overall, I feel like there was times we were up and down a little bit, gave them a little bit too much life in that second period so we gotta clean up some things going into the rest of the tournament but overall I think our effort was there…,” said Will Zellers about how he felt about the effort.
Next up for USA will be Switzerland on Saturday evening, Dec. 27, so they won’t have much time to dwell on what went wrong and celebrate what went right. However, they know what their mistakes were and know what they need to do to fix them to get another win and get closer to gold.
