End of the road
I don’t think anyone thought the US had any shot at winning a gold at the Olympics but the team embarassed itself by only winning one game and getting bounced in the quarterfinals.
Afterward, Mike Modana melts down off camera and criticized USA Hockey for managing poor management and said that players had to make their own travel arrangements for their families. Modana said that the organization needed a complete overhaul, to which the General Manager shockingly disagreed.
The Canadian Hockey team is another story. They were gold medal favorites and lost in the quarterfinals, shut out by the Russians 2-0. Gretzky took the blame for the failure but said he’d be back in 2010. The Canadian press has been critical of the team but seems to be pretty even keeled in the assessment of the loss. Perhaps because the columnists haven’t had a chance to digest the loss yet. We’ll turn to the bloggers for their opinions on the Canada debacle:
[James Mirtle]:
To be honest, I really can’t come up with an example of a best-on-best hockey tournament in which Canada played worse than this one in Turin. Even from the start, when a heavily overmatched Italian team played the Canadians to a 1-1 draw through 22 minutes, it was ugly.
[HockeyAnalysis.com]: The player selection committee has to take some blame for this loss. I criticized the selection committee for taking Draper and Doan and you could have made a strong argument against Martin St. Louis being on the team as well. When I selected my Olympic team I suggested that one of the Tampa players should have been left off the team and St. Louis would have been the obvious choice. Certainly Eric Staal, Sidney Crosby, Patrick Marleau, Alex Tanguay or even Brendan Shanahan would have all contributed more offense than Doan, Draper and St. Louis.
[Canucks Hockey]: To all the armchair GM’s out there, would you have left Joe Thornton and Jarome Iginla, two of the best power forwards in the game but were non-factors for most of the tournament, off the team for Sidney Crosby and Eric Staal? Would you have left Chris Pronger, All-Star and Olympic gold medallist but struggled on the big ice, for Dion Phaneuf? You can go on and on and on for every player on this roster – they were, after all, shut out for three of the six games they played – but hindsight is 20/20.
[Jes Golbez]: Many will expect Wayne Gretzky to shoulder the blame, but I’d put much more of it on the shoulders of coach Pat Quinn. Did Canada look like a poorly coached team to you? To me, Canada lacked exactly what a good coach would provide.
