Mini-Miracle on Ice

Last night, for the first time in 50 years, the United States hockey team defeated Canada in an Olympic match up, 5-3.  While this game wasn’t quite the Miracle on Ice, when a rag-tag group of American college hockey players defeated the powerful USSR when no one gave them a shot to win, it was still a huge upset.   Anyone who watched the game would note that this was an EXCELLENT hockey game, with the kind of passion and hard play you’d expect to see in a NHL playoff game.  It was great stuff to watch.  Here are my observations from the game:

1- Ryan Miller was the key to victory.  USA Goalie Ryan Miller of the Buffalo Sabres dominated in the game against Canada.  The US was badly out shot in the game, 45-23, and while the US clearly hustled to the puck and hit hard,  without Miller’s spectacular play Team USA would have been toast.  Canada has an amazing amount of offensive firepower, and their roster reads like an NHL all star team.  If the US wants to continue to pull off a couple more upsets and get a medal it needs to have stellar play from Miller because the team simply doesn’t have the experience or scoring power of teams like Russia, Canada, and Sweden.

2- The NBC coverage of this game was terrible.  Instead of showing the USA-Canada hockey game live on NBC, the game was relegated to MSNBC.  On top of that, during the beginning of the game NBC was instead showing a replay of the Russia-Czech Republic game that occurred four hours earlier.  To make things even worse, the minute I flipped over from the Russia-Czech game to the US-Canada game MSNBC immediately flashed highlights and the score of the game I had just been watching, giving up the final score.  How incompetent can you be to show a rerun of a hockey game that doesn’t involve the US and the premier hockey team in the Olympics on your main network on Sunday during prime time on the East Coast instead of one of the most anticipated events of the whole Vancouver games?  NBC failed to so much as promote the Canada-US game, when the hype surrounding the game easily could have been huge.  Instead NBC wanted to focus on the background stories of ice dancers (who don’t even jump for god’s sake and wear borderline racist costumes) rather than hype a game with team USA on home ice against the favorites in the Olympics in a sport they occasionally show on their network at non-Olympic times.  I would not be surprised if the NHL no longer allows its players to participate in the Olympics after this year given the limited exposure that NBC seems to be willing to give even the premier hockey game of the tournament so far.  Why risk injury of your players and interrupt the season if your sport isn’t even going to get promotion out of it?  NBC’s coverage has had a lot of flaws during the Olympics, but the lack of coverage of hockey and this game in particular is the most egregious of them all.

3- The pressure is now seriously on for Canada.  Canada clearly has the most talent of any of the hockey teams at the Olympics.  However, the pressure they’re feeling to win gold has now been ratcheted up even further, as Canada has to play in an elimination game to even make the quarterfinals.  While dispatching Germany should be easy, Canada now has to play Russia, a team with Evgeni Malkin and Alexander Ovechkin, in the quarters, followed by a potential match  with Sweden in the semis, who won the gold in 2006.  That’s a rough schedule.   The pressure is so great that perhaps the greatest goalie of all time, Martin Brodeur, who admittedly played terribly against Team USA, is being benched in favor of Roberto Luongo.  The problem with having the best talent and home ice advantage is that the crowd then expects results.  Canada is getting a lot of shots but just not scoring goals.  The team hasn’t really practiced together and really needs to gel quickly if they want to win the gold.