P/I put themselves into a situation of training alongside a Canadian team who finished ahead of them in the free dance at 2015 Nats. P/I did choreographic work with D/L as long ago as 2010 (and with Haguenauer in 2009 and 2011), but P/O are a team who’ve trained full-time with the D/L-Denis crew since they were juniors in 2010; they were given D/L hand-me-down music to skate to and D/L hand-me-down elements then and the relationship has generally come across as close. I actually do think it’s possible for coaches to manage training potential rivals, but I think there’s also a bit of a perhaps natural disparity in the level of investment that might be present.
Dubreuil has also said, more than once I believe, that one of the reasons they were motivated to bring Hubbell/Donohue into the fold is the fact that they have no other American students, so it cuts down on intra-rink competition. Maybe this idea was raised by reporters and she merely offered what they wanted, but its emphasis in quotes from both Dubreuil and H/D makes me wonder how she feels, exactly, about having Canadian teams in close competition with each other.
I’m not a fan of Dubreuil and Lauzon’s choreographic style, admittedly. But I also think it does P/I no favors and I don’t anticipate D/L’s vocabulary expanding so much in the next few months that another FD from them will be beneficial. P/I did a lot of work that I loved or greatly enjoyed with choreographers like Krylova & Camerlengo and Kelly Johnson. There was a greater apparent effort to help them grow their power, or their comfort with outward performance and expression, or with different emotional modes – W.E., the paso doble, Piaf, some solid material that came from work with these parties, and all of it respectably complex as skating material. ("In Your Eyes" was also Johnson’s, taking off from components of Jeff Buttle’s exhibition.) As much as people enjoy some of D/L’s other, non-P/I work – it’s not the type of material that on P/I would encourage anyone to see them in some new light. It’s a lot of variations on lyrical and I can only imagine all the “They can’t skate anything else!!” it would provoke. By their nature, they actually do better when forced out of the softer comfort zone.
Seriously cringeworthy and indulging in all of D/L's worst kitsch tendencies. 
