U.S. women’s hockey team is ready to rumble with Canada
GANGNEUNG, South Korea – The 500-pound elephant is about to enter the Kwandong Hockey Centre. Make that elephants, plural. Team Canada and Team USA, the biggest, baddest women’s hockey squads on the planet, are about to meet again.
It’s just a preliminary round game in the Olympic tournament Thursday, but it’s like having Ali and Frazier fight on the undercard when everybody knows they’re going to meet again in the main event.
Both teams took care of business Tuesday night to improve to 2-0 in the Pyeongchang Games. The Canadians handled Finland with ease, 4-1, and then the Americans peppered the net with 50 shots in a 5-0 victory over the Olympic Athletes from Russia.
Next up, one of the best rivalries in sports.
Since the introduction of the IIHF Women’s World Championship in 1990 and the inclusion of women’s hockey on the Olympic program in 1998, Canada
and the United States have played for gold at every major tournament except the 2006 Olympics, when the U.S. was upset by Sweden in the semifinals.
Team USA won its fourth consecutive world title in April. Canada is seeking its fifth consecutive Olympic gold medal and is riding a 22-game winning streak in the Winter Games, dating to its loss to the U.S. in the gold medal game in the inaugural tournament in Nagano, Japan.
Ladies and gentleman, let’s get ready to rumble.
“Our coaching staff has done a great job getting us up to the level we need to be at,” said Canadian forward Meghan Agosta. “We’re ready to take on whoever gets in our way. It’s going to be an exciting game. It’s always a battle with them.”
For the U.S., it has been four years of soulsearching since MariePhilip Poulin scored a pair of goals to rally Team Canada to a 3-2 overtime victory in the final at the Sochi Games.
“We know that opponent very well,” said U.S. coach Robb Stauber. “We’re just going to play extremely, extremely hard and we’re going to duplicate some of the things that we did very well tonight.”
After taking just seven shots and scoring one goal in the first period, the Americans overwhelmed the Russians with a 24-shot, threegoal barrage in the second. Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson set an Olympic record for men and women by scoring a pair of goals just 6 seconds apart.
First, she poked in a rebound to give the U.S. a 2-0 lead. In the ensuing faceoff, the puck slid toward Russia’s goal between Yekaterina Lobova and Yekaterina Nikolayeva, neither of whom could gain control. Lamoureux Davidson picked it up and flicked in a backhander.
“It’s great that she got it,” Stauber said of the record. “I’m sure that there’s something she wants a lot more than that.”
Yes, that would be the gold medal that Canada has hogged. In the Canadians’ four consecutive Olympic titles, the U.S. has been on the losing end in three of the finals. Canada would seem to have the momentum, too, having won the last four games of an eight-game pre-Olympics tour between the teams.
“The last Olympics, we won the last four going into the tournament,” U.S. forward Monique Lamoureux-Morando pointed out. “Those games really don’t mean anything at this point. They were two months ago and a lot has changed for both teams.”
Stauber just wants his team to keep playing the same way it did in the final two periods against the Russians, who changed goalies in the second. The U.S. was too fast, too skilled and vastly superior at moving and handling the puck.
“In the first period, we missed some opportunities of getting the puck to the net,” Stauber said. “You’re not always going to score but if you’re not taking the opportunities you’re given it’s going to come back and bite you. We just have to stop doing that, which clearly we did in the second and third.
“We’re a team that sometimes can look pretty and look good. That’s fine. But the end result is we’ve got to get more pucks to the net.”
It’s doubtful that the U.S. will get 50 shots on goal against Canada. It’s going to be a knockdown, drag-out.
“We’re ready,” Agosta said. “We know what they bring. We haven’t seen them in a while but we’re ready. We have all the confidence in the world.”