Canada’s group stage win over U.S. didn’t go as planned — but they’ll take it

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This article was published 08/02/2022 (1357 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING—It seems we ask the same question every four years: In the matter of Canada versus the United States in Olympic women’s hockey, what’s to be made of a preliminary-round victory?

Because, let’s face it, Canada’s 4-2 win over the U.S. in the concluding game of group-stage play Tuesday was, in a lot of ways, essentially meaningless. There was nothing on the line save for seeding and, if you believe in such a thing, pre-medal-round psychology. Certainly the seeding in question meant the difference between playing one overmatched hockey minnow or another in the coming quarterfinals.

Barring an unforeseen underperformance in the coming days, the only result anyone will truly care about between the two women’s hockey rivals will be settled a week from tomorrow in the gold-medal game.

Which is not to say both teams didn’t put considerable oomph into Tuesday’s matchup. As a measure of how much Canada wanted the win, consider that top defence pair Renata Fast and Jocelyne Larocque played nearly half a game apiece, logging 29:19 and 26:01, respectively. The bottom of Canada’s lineup barely saw the ice. And why not? There’s plenty of time for the top players to rest between now and the end. You can make the case these teams simply don’t play each other enough to write off any game as irrelevant.

“Every time we go in (against the U.S.), we want to make a statement. Just show them that they don’t belong on the ice with us,” said Natalie Spooner, the forward who is playing in her third Olympics for Canada.

If Canada was hoping to demoralize the defending gold medallists to the point of having them resign from the tournament pre-emptively — well, they failed miserably at that bit of business. Never mind the final score: You could look at the shots-on-goal total and make a decent case that it’s the U.S. that made the case for superiority Tuesday. The Americans outshot Canada by something close to a 2-to-1 margin, 53-27. And while that lopsided tally didn’t exactly hearten U.S. coach Joel Johnson — “Shots don’t win games,” Johnson rightly pointed out, “goals do.” — it’s hard to imagine Canada coach Troy Ryan will be asking for a repeat performance of that disparity when these teams meet next.

While the U.S. players weren’t sold on the shot clock being a key performance indicator — “We had a lot of shots from the perimeter,” goaltender Maddie Rooney said — the steady stream of American pucks on net was certainly a comment on Canada’s more-than-occasional struggle to break out of their own end. Canadian giveaways were rampant Tuesday. Many a pizza up the middle was served, which led to Canada being hemmed in its own zone too often.

“It wasn’t necessarily their pressure. It was us forcing plays to the middle of the ice,” Ryan said. “If we do a better job managing the puck, you probably knock off 15 to 20 of those shots.”

Ryan wasn’t pleased, either, with the discipline discrepancy. Canada took six minor penalties to the U.S.’s one. And if not for some stellar penalty killing, which held the Americans to one power-play goal, things could have easily gone the wrong way.

Still, nobody on Canada’s roster seemed willing to tone down its no-prisoners style in the name of staying out of the box.

“If we take a couple of physical penalties here and there, we’re OK with that,” Larocque said, “because we trust our (penalty kill), and it pays dividends in the long run when we’re physical and we play the body.”

And nobody on Canada was freaking out about the shot disparity.

“I hate to say it. We don’t have a lot of concern in us,” Ryan said. “There’s never that sense of panic or concern. It’s just, ‘Hey, we didn’t come out the way we wanted to.’ We make a little adjustment and we move forward.”

Here’s what the Canadians were comfortable saying for sure about Tuesday’s win, which saw Jamie Lee Rattray score the winner, Brianne Jenner net a pair for Canada and captain Marie-Philip Poulin score Canada’s first penalty-shot goal in an Olympics. In Ann-Renée Desbiens, Canada has the best goaltender on the planet. Not only did she set a national Olympic record by stopping 51 shots Tuesday, she did so after opening the tournament with three blowout wins in which she hadn’t been asked to do much. She had saved a combined 53 shots in the opening three contests.

“I enjoy it personally, but from a team perspective that’s not the kind of game you want to have too often,” Desbiens said of her busy afternoon in the crease. “So I guess it just showed that we can improve on things, get better during the medal round. Selfishly, it’s fun. But I’d rather not.”

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That’s a nice thing to know, that your goaltender won’t be fazed by a barrage of American rubber.

“We’ve got to find a different way to create higher-quality scoring chances if we expect to win a game like this,” Johnson said of the U.S. offence. “We’ve got to change how we attack, where we go and how we change our angle.”

For Canada, maybe hearing the Americans second-guessing their strategy was as important as the final score, even if Ryan was clear which side of the ledger he’d rather his team sit. Canada hasn’t lost a preliminary-round game to the U.S. — or to anybody, for that matter — since the inaugural Olympic tournament in Nagano in 1998. That’s a 19-game win streak to keep intact. Still, in Pyeongchang four years ago, Canada beat the U.S. in the preliminary round before losing in a shootout in the gold-medal game.

“I’d always rather be on (the winning) side of it,” Ryan said. “But history says it doesn’t necessarily mean a lot.”

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk