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VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Canada coach Brent Sutter wants his team to have a "pack of wolves" attitude at the world junior hockey tournament.

Players stray from the team's identity at their peril, as forward Guillaume Latendresse found out in a 5-1 win over Finland to open the tournament Monday.

He barely played in the second period because Sutter felt he was not getting physically involved.

Latendresse is a second-round pick of the Montreal Canadiens and one of the top scorers in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. But Sutter doesn't distinguish one player from another when it comes to sending a message.

Many of the Canadian players are too young to have seen the six Sutter brothers play in the NHL, but Brent won Stanley Cups and Canada Cups as an NHL player. The players accept his word as law.

"He played in the NHL," Latendresse said Tuesday after practice. "When he's talking to you and he says something, you want to listen to him and do the things he asking you to because he knows the game and he knows how to play it."

Canada was to meet Switzerland on Wednesday and Norway on Thursday before concluding the round robin of Group A on Saturday against the United states.

In Tuesday's games, Slovakia beat Latvia 7-4 and Switzerland blanked Norway 2-0.

Forward Steve Downie sat out Tuesday's practice with a stomach ailment believed to be the same Ryan O'Marra suffered late last week. But Downie is expected in the lineup against the Swiss.

The Canadian team is emerging as a squad whose forte is forechecking and harrying the opposition to cough up the puck before it ever gets to Canada's blue-line, and making the opposition pay the price physically if it does get into the offensive zone.

Captain Kyle Chipchura and forwards Blake Comeau and Dustin Boyd were the leaders in that effort, and of the Canadian team against Finland.

The pressure game works for Canada because the European teams are accustomed to having more room on a larger ice surface. If the Canadians take away their time and space in the offensive zone, they can gain the puck and score off transition or draw a penalty and score on the power play.

Sutter believes the pro-active defense produces positive results, not the least of which is that Pogge saw only 17 shots from a Finnish team with some high-end scorers.

"We've got to be a pressure-type team," Sutter said. "I don't believe in being on our heels and I don't believe in having forwards skating backwards to the neutral zone.

"To be a good defensive team, you want to keep it out of your end as much as you can," he said, "and the way you do that is by pressuring the team in their own zone and getting the puck back and playing in their zone as much as possible."

It's the same philosophy Sutter had with the 2005 Canadian junior team that won the gold medal in Grand Forks, N.D. He says his beliefs stay the same, no matter who the players are.

Canada gave up an odd-man rush in the first 10 minutes of the game against Finland and although Pogge made the save, Sutter doesn't want to see that happen again in this tournament.

"That was unacceptable," Sutter said. "Your second or third forechecker didn't do their job in the offensive zone."

Canada isn't likely to score pretty, end-to-end goals in this tournament. There may be more "greasy, garbage goals" as Boyd puts it.

Canada got into penalty trouble along with the frustrated Finns when the game got out of hand and that should be a worry going forward, even though one of Canada's strengths is penalty killing. afford to empty the tank early in the tournament killing penalties.

"You can always kill the good penalties," Sutter said. "It's the bad penalties that the hockey gods get even with you."

Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press