Notebook cleanout from the U18s

Most of the information I gathered at the U18s went straight into prospects' profiles and feature stories at HF. That process is still going on. But here's a few leftovers.

• I think Nashville will try to take Ryan O'Reilly. They already have his brother Cal and I was chatting with a scout in the stands and when I said I was originally from Erie, he brought up O'Reilly and said how much he liked him. I later found out he worked for Nashville.
• Jerry D'Amigo put up a lot of points. But I kept thinking "all he can do is score goals." While that sounds great, being one-dimensional doesn't get you to the NHL.
  
• Adam Murray made some big motions in net for the USA, like a windmill and a couple statues of liberty. Good goalies make the hard saves look easy by being in position for them to hit in the stomach. But what he was doing was making normal saves look hard. I see why he is ranked so low.
• Team USA captain William Wrenn had the misfortune of being paired with Nick Mattson, who was not impressive. I wanted to see Wrenn separately.
• David Valek (USA) was invisible. I looked for him a few times, just to fill something in for him, and still had nothing to say.
  
• Simon Bertilsson looks a lot like Jimmy Slater in the face. And they are both poor interviews, but for different reasons. Bertilsson only speaks Swedish. Slater only speaks cliche.

• Russian warmups was pure chaos. There didn't seem to be much of a plan, and by the end it deteriorated into individuals roaming on their own, doing trick shots. You can see a lot of a people's culture in their warmup I think.
  
• Tarasenko, 2010-eligible, really likes attention. Really really likes attention. Not only does he talk when the questions aren't posed to him, he saw me with a camera and was posing. Much like Angelo Esposito has done in the past.
  
• Czech Roman Horak has talent, but he's a hot dog who only skates hard when he has the puck. He stood around most of the warmup. I got a photo of him scratching his backside in warmup and that kind of epitomized things.

• If Sweden had had a little better goaltending, things might have been different. It was the weakest position on a top-notch squad. Using their skill instead of their force would have played more to their advantage as well.