“He’s one of the most complete defencemen in the league”, said Team Europe defenceman Andrej Sekera, who played briefly with Doughty during the 2014-15 season.
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The ice now where in the World Cup of Hockey its do-or-die for team Europe when they go up against Canada for the second game of their best of the final series in Toronto.
Members of Team Canada would say Game 1 of the World Cup of Hockey final was their weakest of the tournament, leading one to believe there is plenty of firepower left in a squad that downed Team Europe 3-1 on Tuesday.
Europe were big time underdogs coming into the tournament in their opener against the Americans and in every subsequent game following for reasons unbeknownst to me as they have a pretty deep roster and a balance of youth and leadership to boot.
As the 2016 World Cup winds down, we wondered: Was the eight-team, best-on-best tournament a triumph for the sport? “You’ve just got to try to keep them to the outside, try to stay inside of them and try your best”.
“The way Sid’s line is playing, the way Price is playing, you can have an off-game and still find a way to win a game”, Jonathan Toews said ahead of Game 2 of the best-of-three final. “It’s always nice to score, but we knew that we had to play a certain way and sometimes that meant not scoring five or six to win”.
Tomas Tatar scored the lone goal for Team Europe.
It has been almost a mystery as to how the Canadian coach has kept the same lineups for multiple games, considering most teams do not have that kind of chemistry amongst the players, and definitely not consistently for more than one game. Pair those guys with veterans and pure skill players like Chicago Blackhawks’ right wing Patrick Kane and the USA will be in good shape.
If Team Europe manages to beat Canada in game two, forcing a winner-take-all match on Saturday, I suspect it will garner a lot of eyeballs. You make them against that team, you’ll lose. It committed too many turnovers. Tuesday’s first period was indicative of that. McDavid has already said he hopes to play for Canada and not North America at the next event.
Now the NHL and ESPN had to know that the tournament would start off slow in its first time back in over a decade, but they couldn’t have predicted the lack of fandom in Toronto, a city that sleeps, eats, and breathes hockey. But all the forced hype in the world can’t make fans get behind a tournament if they don’t truly care about it. It wasn’t one of the better meetings, Ryan O’Reilly said afterward. “We hung in there [in Game 1] and had some good chances”. But Canada has found another way to win.
Kopitar has more on his mind besides Thursday’s game. Could Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron and Marchand reunite in two years if the National Hockey League returns to the Olympics in South Korea? “Come out, play hard, and we’ll see what happens”.
If success is measured in part by pure enjoyment of the product, then having Team North America dazzle us for three tournament games qualifies this World Cup as a rousing success.
Once again, it was Canada’s top line of Marchand, Crosby and Patrice Bergeron that propelled the team to victory. Crosby, Marchand and Bergeron rank among the top three scorers in the tournament. No one expected us to be here. “The bottom line is that we leave here with nothing”, Tortorella said.
For example, check out the highlight-reel hit that Doughty delivered on Frans Nielsen in the dying minutes of Game 1.
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“He got feeling it early”, Babcock said. The U.S. heavily outshot Team Europe. It’s unlikely, however, that Canada and its collection of talent will play another game as poorly as it did on Tuesday.
