Who would have thought that a made-up team created to even out the groups and manufacture intrigue in the World Cup of Hockey would capture everyone’s hearts the way that it has?
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Tortorella said he had a few ideas about changes that could be made but preferred to keep those to himself.
Armstrong and his executives may have built a almost flawless Canadian team. It has allowed just three goals, controlled the play for extended stretches and is averaging nearly five goals and more than 43 shots a game.
Before the loss, the American brass expressed its butthurt over chirping by players (OK, one player, Phil Kessel) who weren’t responsible for the squad’s elimination Tuesday by host Canada.
The GM had been working on the roster for more than a year.
This team was bad, even worse than the 1976 Canada Cup team that was loaded with non-NHL players, but given the expectations and talent level of the 1998 team, that still represented the nadir for USA Hockey.
“The reality is, can you really do that over five days?” Canada dumped Russian Federation 7-3 in the quarter-finals en route to a gold medal in Vancouver. Pacific time, and Sweden will face Team Europe at 10 a.m. Sunday Pacific time.
“Coming here we wanted to in some way to showcase ourselves, too, that this can work, that we’re not just here to be three and out, and I think we’ve kind of shown that”, said Kopitar, who has had one assist in three games. “One of the qualities I’ve always mentioned why we had a lot of success there is that even in moments where you can be in a playoff series down two or 3-1, there’s never that feeling that anyone’s hitting the panic button”. “I think they like to compete”.
“This is the longest time I’ve been away from NY since I came over for the first year”, said Lundqvist, who arrived for the 2005-06 season and is Broadway’s longest-running show on ice. The subject of social media assassin Phil Kessel was raised, and Lombardi implied the Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup victor didn’t have the right makeup to be part of the team.
“With this team I’m very, very rarely nervous”, said Drew Doughty. “I have a ton of respect for all those guys there”. Sweden uncharacteristically went 0-for-5 on the power play against Team North America. “Canada was like just more physical”. Tortorella was in fine form on Thursday, acknowledging without reservation the shortcomings of his team when stacked up against the Canadians.
“For us, there can’t be any casual moments with how risky some of these players are”, Canada and Sabres forward Ryan O’Reilly said. In a way, Babcock is already coaching in hockey’s Siberia as the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Ba-Dum-Tss), so it will be interesting to see the fallout if Babcock doesn’t deliver the goods to hockey fans across Canada. It’s a situation where I still think, in our mind, we could not just skill our way through Canada. “He switched the momentum after they scored and went up 2-1, and got the momentum back at the end of the second so we could regroup and come back in with a little bit more confidence”. “Our thoughts were right at Canada”.
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Brad Marchand whipped the go-ahead goal past Sergei Bobrovsky at the early stage of the third period, with Canada adding two more goals in a decisive 5-3 win.
That was one more goal than Patrick Kane scored in the tournament. Canada gave up just three goals in winning all three games of the preliminary round and has trailed for only 89 seconds. The US went 0-3 and failed to qualify for the semi-finals.
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As for Thursday’s game: The U.S. got down, Abdelkader scored, the Americans lost again. And when it comes to the eye test, was there any time that it seemed the Americans were dictating the pace of the game, where they had things under control, where they were successfully executing a game plan?
