The USA is through to the semifinals as the most impressive team standing in these Sochi Games. That and two more victories will get them the gold medal, same as it will Canada, the Yanks’ opponent on Friday, and same as it will both Sweden and Finland, who will meet in the Olympics’ other semifinal match.
It will be a glorious day for hockey featuring rematches of the 2010 gold-medal game between Canada and the US and of the 2006 gold-medal showdown between Sweden and Finland, but it will not a grand day for hockey in Russia, not with the mighty home team going down with little more than a whimper in Wednesday’s 3-1 quarterfinal defeat to Finland.
Vladimir Putin was among those in the audience watching with faces of stone that were ultimately crushed. Alexander Ovechkin scored 1:17 into the Olympics, Evgeni Malkin followed at 3:54 of the first period of the first game and neither scored again for the remainder of the tournament while remaining locked together as linemates.
The Russians, who had imploded in Vancouver in a laughingstock 7-3 defeat to Canada in the quarters, don’t produce enough NHL-caliber defensemen and they don’t produce the adaptability required to become a working unit with so little time to prepare for best-on-best hockey.
As has become the case from the country that has won one silver medal in 1998 and one bronze in 2002 since the NHL began sending its players to the Games in 1998, Russia was less than the sum of its parts.
The US, meanwhile, has been more than the sum of its parts through its spotless 4-0 run that continued with an impressive 5-2 quarterfinal victory over the Czech Republic.
The Yanks are an extremely well-coached and disciplined club that hit the ground running on Day One. But other than T.J. Oshie’s “A Star is Born” shootout performance, the Americans are playing the roles they were born for, because those are the roles they play in the NHL.
General manager David Poile and his staff had it all in front of them when they set about picking the best team, not necessarily the best players, to represent the US. For the fact is, the best players that USA Hockey produces are also the best team players.
Pittsburgh and US coach Dan Bylsma and his assistants, Tony Granato and Peter Laviolette, are asking players to adapt to different situations and different linemates and partners in Sochi, not to become different players.
Ryan Callahan is indefatigable with a work ethic that sets the bar for his teammates because that’s who he always has been. His union with St. Louis center David Backes throughout the tournament has been natural and imposing enough to provoke much thought inside Blues management of offering more than Chris Stewart for the ability to acquire the Blueshirts captain as at least a rental for the remainder of the NHL season.
Callahan, Backes and left wing Dustin Brown (rather than Zach Parise, who flipped onto the unit with Ryan Kesler and Patrick Kane) were used as a checking line to shut down the Jaromir Jagr-Tomas Plekanec-Roman Cervenka unit. They not only kept No. 68 and mates off the board, but Brown and Backes accounted for two themselves.
Phil Kessel, meanwhile, second overall in the NHL to Ovechkin with 31 goals, is tied with Austria’s (and the Islanders’) Michael Grabner for the Olympic lead with five goals.
Drummers drumming, flautists flouting.
If flow and confidence have marked the Americans’ march to the semis, an absence of both seems to be attached to the Canadians’ work product thus far, even if they have also won all four games they have played.
Nothing is coming easy for this top-heavy team that seems weighed down and on which a first-line player like Rick Nash can be skipped in the rotation while Marty St. Louis can’t get off the bench in the third period. Sidney Crosby has looked ordinary for long stretches at a time.
But Canada struggled into the medal round in 2002, blown out by Sweden in the opener and then tied by the Czech Republic in the third game before capturing the gold with a 5-2 victory over a US team that had been unbeaten.
The Yanks beat Canada 5-3 in the preliminary round in Vancouver in 2010 and were primed for the gold-medal rematch that they would lose to Canada in overtime.
So both 12 and four years later, the Americans go into the semifinals as the Olympics’ most impressive team.
That and two wins gets them the gold medal.