Canada and Russian Federation renew hostilities at the Air Canada Centre on Saturday night as both teams look to advance to the gold medal game at the World Cup of Hockey. “They went one route, so hopefully next time I’m playing better so I can make it”.
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“Canada, Russia always sounds good”, said Team Canada head coach Mike Babcock, looking ahead to Saturday’s showdown.
But there is one memory on the worldwide stage that Toews tried to bury before it came to the forefront of his mind Friday – a loss to Russian Federation in the 2008 world championships in Canada.
The balance on Team Canada has been evident since the rosters were named earlier in the year, and that factor has played out in the tournament.
It was not to be for the North Americans, however, as Russian Federation scored three unanswered goals in a relatively routine victory thanks to Vladimir Tarasenko, Ivan Telegin and Evgeni Malkin.
Team USA dropped their third and final game of the tournament to the Czech Republic, 4-3, on Thursday night, and underperformed in a big way with just a handful of goals scored while going winless in all three games. It was the feeling that we still had a chance to win; we just had to score one goal. “I’m happy for the boys, they came out and played the game”.
Prior to the game, coach John Tortorella addressed the criticism the team had received on social media from alumni including Phil Kessel, Brett Hull and Jeremy (Jere-ME) Roenick. It was a lot of speed there. “When you come into an event and you throw on the Canadian jersey the expectation and the feeling in the room is that we want to win and we’re here to win”.
Team Russia finished with a 2-1-0 mark to match Team North America in Group B play, but the former advanced courtesy of its 4-3 victory in head-to-head competition on Monday.
“We got some darn good players, but the reality is, that matchup on a skill basis, if you want to go head-to-head and play a skill game, your odds of winning that game when you look at those matchups is not very good”, Lombardi said during an extensive state of the team news conference Thursday, not long before the Americans played their final game of the tourney.
“A loss for us, but we did well today”, Russian coach Oleg Znarok said.
The Finns almost took the lead early in the second period, but Granlund clipped the post.
In a release sent out Friday, Canada Post says these new stamps are meant to “highlight some of the greatest goal-scorers ever to play in the National Hockey League”. But this time, it was the Soviets who ran up the score, earning an 8-1 win and handing Canada what still stands to this day as its most embarrassing global loss. After penalty killing second period, we have a good scoring chance, for example, Granlund, but he (hit the) post, and then (the) goal against. You could make that team 100 different ways and I think if you had 100 different people picking a team there is not going to be a consensus on every single person.
Telegin picked up Vadim Shipachev’s feed and powered around Rask for his first of the tournament at 5:01 of the second.
Evgeni Malkin added a power-play goal in the third, while Bobrovsky stopped all 21 shots he faced for his first shutout of the tournament.
That was when Kessel singlehandedly won the tournament.
They meet Canada next, and the Olympic champs have not lost at the senior level since the 2010 Olympics – a stretch of 13 games. The atmosphere’s going to be unbelievable.
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Team Europe will play Sweden in the other semifinal Sunday.
