A shell shocked Alex Ovechkin will be winging it back from Washington on Thursday morning. His dreams of delivering a gold medal to his mother Russia dies at the hands of Teemu Selanne, Mikael Granlund, Tuuka Rask and Team Finland on Wednesday. With the weight of a nation on its shoulders, Team Russia buckled under the intense pressure of having to play perfect hockey in order to achieve gold medal greatness. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. Team Russia failed miserably. For posterity, captain Ovechkin will have the fingers of blame pointed at him by his head coach and by knee-jerk reaction fans. Heading into the Olympic tourney, critics correctly maligned the Russian blue line for its lack of play makers and mobility. The critics were not wrong. The Russian D corps was slow, sloppy and mistake prone in all five games. The Finns made them pay for sloppy play in the quarterfinal game. The prevailing thought in pre-tourney previews was that Russia’s offense would have to carry it while its goaltending would have to bail out the D from its mistakes and blunders. Ovechkin wasn’t the problem. He was trying to be a part of the solution. Ovechin's clap-bombs from the left faceoff dot were virtually non existent in Sochi. Why didn't his head coach mix up his lines in an effort to get Ovechkin into a scoring groove?
It’s not Ovechkin’s fault that Malkin, Radulov, Semin, Kovalchuk and other key contributors failed to produce goals in clutch moments. In five games played, Ovechkin scored once and added an assist. Datsyuk was the only Russian NHLer to score more than one goal. Semin, Tarasenko, Nikitin, Kulemin failed to score one goal.
Russian head coach Zinetula Bilyaletdinov is the man to blame for Russia’s anemic offense. His team scored only 12 goals in regulation time in five games. Subtext: 9 of Russia’s goals came against Slovenia and Norway. Meaning, only three goals were scored against the USA, Slovakia, and Finland.
Was it Ovechkin that benched Sergei Bobrovsky and started Semyon Varlamov in his place for the tap-out game versus Finland? Great call, coach.
Who is the Russian general manager responsible for assembling a group of talented individuals who were incapable of playing together as a team to achieve team goals. Where was the cohesion? The chemistry? Nice roster: half NHL, half KHL. No continuity. No clutch goals. No D-zone stops when they mattered the most. No medals.
After getting punted from the quarterfinal game by Finland, a crestfallen Ovechkin manned up, looked into the CBC camera, and tried to make sense of the failure with Elliotte Friedman:
“That’s a big question. It’s tough. It’s the second Olympic Games that we lost in that kind of game and it’s bad. Team fight, team play ’til the end and nobody gave up, but we didn’t score second goal and it was pretty hard.…
“It sucks, that’s all I can say,… Ovechkin said.
“No emotion right now,… Ovechkin said.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C, Ovechkin’s head coach Adam Oates came to the defense of his captain:
Thanks, Monumental Network
Oates may have to tread lightly around Ovechkin for his first couple of days back on U.S. soil. In a way, its like Ovechkin is seeking asylum from all of the sneers and jeers that are flying at break neck speed in his homeland. Solace and serenity await him in Washington. However, the memory remains. Ovechkin will have to answer the tough questions posed to him by the Washington media. He'll also have to answer questions out on the road. There's no escaping it. He'll have to stand in the pocket and deliver thoughtful answers. He'll likely get sick of answering the questions after a while.
I see Oates working. The last thing that he and the Caps need right now is an emotional, distracted Ovechkin falling into a massive scoring slump when his teammates need him the most. Ovechkin leads the NHL is goals scored with 39. As he goes, so go the Capitals. a prolonged scoring slump would doom the Caps and their chances to achieve an Eastern conference playoff berth. Caps GM George McPhee must be cognizant of the prospect of Ovechkin coming home with a serious case of the Sochi Flu. The Caps can ill afford to have Ovi slip into a deep scoring depression. His 39 goals lead the NHL at the Olympic break.
One way for GM GM to defend against a potential power outage is to upgrade his goaltending.
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The CBC cameras caught several candid camera shots of Team Canada GM Steve Yzerman dealing with the high level of anxiety that was the result of being deadlocked in a 1-1 game, in a win-or-go-home scenario. Yzerman must have been feeling a crap-ton of added stress and anxiety as the Latvian goaltender Kristers Gudlevskis is also a Tampa Bay Lightning prospect. The Syracuse Crunch tender, who nearly wrecked his NHL boss’s Sochi gold medal dreams, was starting in place of Latvian hero and grinder Edgars Malsakis who had valiantly carried his team to the quarterfinals game against the rich kids from Canada. The hockey snobs vs. the hockey slobs, as it were. Man alive, what a great game it was!
Gudlevskis was called upon by Ted Nolan to take the reigns from Malsaskis in the biggest game in Latvian international hockey history. Gudlevskis heroically made 55 saves on 57 Canadian shots. The poor 22-year-old was under siege all game long, however, he and his Latvian brothers refused to crumble under the excruciating circumstances. Playing in only his second career Olympic game, Gudlevskis some of the best players in the world. Time after time, Gudlevskis took Canada’s best punches and just shrugged them off. The guy at the lonely end of the rink, Canada’s Carey Price tipped his mask to Gudlevskis after the 2-1 Canada win.
"Their goaltender played awesome," Price told the IIHF. "That was one of the best goaltending performances I’ve ever seen in a long time. He played a heck of a game."
Latvia’s moral compass and gig engine that could, Zemgus Girgensons (1 goal and 1 assist in 5 games at Sochi), said that all of the heat and pressure was clearly on the Canadians in the quarterfinals.
"It was easier to play today because we had nothing to lose," suggested Zemgus Girgensons. "They had a lot to lose. We believed in ourselves the whole time. We just play a different style. That’s why they got that many shots. It was just too bad we didn’t get lucky on some of our shots."
The Latvians leave Sochi having struck fear in the hearts and minds of players, coaches and executives from the entire international ice hockey community.
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Mike Babcock and his Team Canada coaches don’t have long to figure out valid, productive line combos that will help them to generate more goals. Team USA has shown that it can rely on multiple lines for its goal scoring. Team Canada is not as confident in its forwards.
The Canadians have scored just 13 goals in its first four games at Sochi. Defensemen Drew Doughty and She Weber have 7 goals between them (Doughty has 4, Weber 3). Of the ten forwards on Canada’s roster, only four have scored goals. Jeff Carter has 3, while Patrick Sharp, Jamie Benn, and Ryan Getzlaf have one goal apiece.
Paging Mr. Crosby. Paging, Mr. Sidney Crosby.
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