WJC Countdown: Peter Forsberg sets tournament record with whopping 31 points
Peter Forsberg is the World Juniors all-time leader in points. In 14 games in the tournament, he posted a whopping 42 points, a total very unlikely to ever be broken.
Drafted with the sixth overall pick in the 1991 NHL draft by the Philadelphia Flyers, Forsberg really broke onto the scene the following winter at the World Juniors in Germany. Him and fellow players from the 1991 draft Michael Nylander and Markus Naslund, dominated the tournament. Nylander led the tournament with 17 points in seven games, while Forsberg and Naslund had 11 and 10 respectively.
Sweden would end up finishing with a silver medal in the tournament. This was back in the time in which eight teams all played each other and there wasn’t a preliminary or playoff round and the medals were decided solely on record from the seven games. The Swedes were edged out by the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was the Soviet Union team after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
In June 1992, after holding out for an entire season, the Quebec Nordiques dealt 1991 first overall pick Eric Lindros to the Flyers in a massive blockbuster trade. Lindros was the best prospect to come along in years but didn’t want to play in the French-speaking Quebec City, but the Nordiques waited a full year to finally pull the trigger on a deal. When they did, they received a package from the Flyers centred around Forsberg.
While he was obviously a highly-touted prospect considering his draft status and performance in with Modo in Sweden, it wasn’t until the World Juniors in 1993 a few months after the Lindros deal that the Nordiques realized what they had in Forsberg.
The duo of Forsberg and Naslund returned to the World Juniors in Sweden in 1993 and went completely nuts. Forsberg racked up 31 points in seven games, good for 4.43 points-per-game, a tournament record. Naslund scored 13 goals, which is also a tournament record. But despite the legendary performance from Forsberg and Naslund, Sweden didn’t capture gold. Their 6-1 record was tied for first with Canada, but the Swedes dropped the head-to-head matchup between the two countries, giving the Canadians the edge in the tiebreaker.
Despite not winning gold, the individual success of Forsberg at the tournament was staggering. His 31 points led the tournament and, to put it in context, was more than Canada’s three top scorers combined.
Forsberg would spend one more season in Europe before breaking into the NHL. In 1994, he and other former Swedish World Juniors players won gold for Sweden at the Olympics in Lillehammer. Forsberg and Naslund would reunite again at the international level multiple times, highlighted by an Olympic gold medal win in 2006.
In 2014, Forsberg was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, having won two Stanley Cups, two Olympic golds, and producing 885 points in 708 NHL games. He never won a World Junior gold, but Forsberg is the tournament’s all-time leading scorer with a record likely never to be broken.