Day 5 - What a game!

Well, the Canadian Men's Junior team won their 5th straight gold medal tonight.  The game was much better than I expected, after watching the Canada vs USA and hearing about the Canada vs Russia game.  Canada tied Russia with 5 seconds left and won in the shoot out to make it to tonight, so I was wondering what the play would be like.

When Canada played the USA, they won, but both teams play a similar style - fast and loose, lots of checking and dump-and-chase play.  Plus there was no love lost between the two teams, so it was exciting hockey.  An excellent game.  However, I watched the Sweden vs Russia game earlier that day and the Swedes played a very skillful puck-control game.  The Russians were not able to take the puck off them in the Swedish zone, making their attacking play pretty abrupt.  Given those two examples, I expected Sweden to dominate play.

Thankfully, I was wrong!  A quick goal early on put the Swedes back on their heels.  As the game wore on, it was clear that team Canada was trying hard to force bad passes, stay in the passing lanes and prevent the stretch passes and quick play that marked the Swedish play earlier in the tournament.  It looked like things were going to fall apart for Canada after they started getting a lot of penalties in the 2nd, but the Canadian netminder Tokarski played a great game, keeping Sweden off the score board through 2 periods.   I think it was a critical step that Team Canada start the third with no goals against, and a power play to boot.

In spite of the many penalties, Canada played a disciplined game, especially a few times when emotions looked to boil over, but the players stayed away from team Sweden after the whistle to make sure no calls would be made.  I thought the Canadian players did a good job staying away from the Swedish goaltender, who spent most of the game trying to draw penalties.  

An excellent game and I'm glad I watched it.  Hopefully that same discipline can be applied next year to try and bring home gold again!