Teen hockey phenom Chloe Primerano makes Team Canada debut in Rivalry Series

Teenage phenom Chloe Primerano made her debut for Team Canada on Wednesday night during Game 1 of the Canada-USA Rivalry Series in San Jose, Calif.

The 17-year-old was the youngest player named to Team Canada's roster for the November slate of games. Primerano is now the second-youngest defender to ever play for Canada's senior national women's team behind Cheryl Pounder — a hockey broadcast analyst for TSN — who debuted for Canada as a teenager at the 1994 women's world championships.

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Primerano started the game on a pair with Jocelyne Larocque, Canada's long-time top-pair defender.

It's yet another benchmark for Primerano, who is charting a unique path in women's hockey. In September, she made her highly-anticipated NCAA debut with the University of Minnesota a year earlier than expected after graduating high school early and starting college at 17. Primerano is the youngest player in women's college hockey and has six points in 10 games for the No. 3 Golden Gophers — good for second among defenders on her team.

"She has nothing really to prove at this U18 level, and going to the college level she can really see what she really needs to work on at that level to continue to grow throughout the Canadian national program," Primerano's high school coach Kris Hogg told in September. "Sometimes you gotta dive right in with two feet and then see where everything goes."

Primerano first made headlines in May 2022 when she was drafted by the WHL's Vancouver Giants (268th overall), becoming the first female skater ever selected in a Canadian Hockey League draft. She only made the transition to women's hockey in 2022-23, joining the RINK Academy elite girls program and winning back-to-back CSSHL championships and league MVPs. In two seasons at RINK, Primerano finished third all-time in scoring (137 points in 59 games) and first among defenders.

She has already established herself as one of the most promising prospects in women's hockey. She is dynamic on the blue line with elite skating and edgework and sees the game at a very high level: a rare breed of defender who can make something out of nothing.

"There's players that are elite skaters, there's players that are elite puck handlers, there's players that have a really high hockey IQ or they're goal scorers or they set people up — Chloe is a culmination of all of it," said Minnesota coach Brad Frost.

That Primerano cracked the November Rivalry Series roster is significant, given college players don't typically go to the final leg of the series in February as it's too close to the end of the NCAA season. So she will get three chances to showcase her game to Canada's brain trust at a critical event for national team evaluation.

"The 2025 IIHF Women's World Championship is only six months away, and getting a look at our team and roster depth begins with these first three games," Canada general manager Gina Kingsbury said in a statement when the roster was announced last month.

With a strong performance, Primerano could force herself into consideration for a major international roster spot. It wouldn't be unheard of for a player like Primerano to jump from U18 worlds — which she's still eligible to go to in January 2024 — to the April women's worlds. Especially when we consider Primerano led last year's U18 worlds in scoring, set a record for scoring by a defender and won tournament MVP at 16 years old.

Still, with a veteran D-core and the return of Olympic record-holder Claire Thompson, cracking Team Canada's blue line full-time is a tough task. Typically, Canada brings 23 players to worlds with seven defenders, whereas the Rivalry roster is 25 players with eight defenders.

Patty Kazmaier Award winner Daryl Watts also made her long-awaited Team Canada debut in the game. Watts is one of the highest-scoring players of all time in the NCAA (297 points in 172 games). Her exclusion from the national team has been a source of consternation among fans for years, but after an excellent rookie season in the PWHL , she's officially back on Team Canada for the first time since the 2017 U18 women's world championships.

(Photo: Vedran Galijas / Just Pictures / Sipa USA / Sipa via AP Images)