IIHF World Championship Qualifying Round Begins Thursday

(ATR) The qualifying round of the 2007 IIHF World Championships start Thursday in Moscow, with many of the same teams advancing that madethe second round of last year’s tournament.

Under the tournamentformat, 16 teams are grouped in a round-robin preliminary round, with 4 teams in each group. The top three teams in each group advance to the qualifying round.

In the first qualifying group, defending champion Sweden will join Switzerland, Italy, Slovakia, Germany, and Canada. The second group will feature the Czech Republic, the United States, Russia, Finland, Belarus, and Denmark. Nine of these teams were part of last year’s qualifying round.

Following the qualifying round, the top four teams will advance to the quarterfinals, which start on May 9. The four teams that did not advance (Latvia, Norway, Ukraine and Austria) will start relegation round play on Friday.

In other news from the World Championships:

- Members of Canada’s opposition party called on the Shane Doan (Phoenix Coyotes)team to remove Shane Doan as captain for allegedly insulting the country's Francophone minority. The claim stems from a 2005 NHL game in which, according to the politicians, the Phoenix Coyotes forward made slurs at French-Canadian officials.

"If someone had made remarks like that about blacks, aboriginals or Jews, that would quite rightly have been denounced," said Party leader Gilles Duceppe. "It's not the first time that words like that (have been) used against French players. It's almost a tradition. And we should accept that? Never," he said.

Doan denies the charges, and was cleared by the NHL after the incident. “I take huge pride in playing for my country, I take huge pride in representing everybody," he told reporters. "For them to question me, being the captain, is incredibly disappointing. I don't understand how someone can attack when I've been cleared by the NHL, I never said it, yet they can just throw it out in the House of Commons (chamber of Parliament). Those are our leaders. Those are the people that we're supposed to look up to."

- Canada defenseman Shea Baker was suspended for three games on Monday for elbowing German forward Yannic Seidenberg in the head during a game last week. Germany coach Uwe Krupp told reporters that Seidenberg is unlikely to play again in the tournament.

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