The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

Team Canada fans, I'd like to apologize for last night's debacle. You see, I called for a Team Canada win. Not only that, I expected the Russians to get spanked and spanked hard last night. So before game time I was posting facebook updates and comments pretty much guaranteeing a gold medal. "Bet your first born!" was the mantra at my office.

Good thing we can't actually do that.

In all honesty, I thought Russia had no business being in the finals. They lost to Sweden and Canada in the round-robin, needed a shootout in the semi-finals to get their ticket to the gold medal game after blowing a 2-0 lead and they seemed to be "reactive" rather than "proactive" in their games.

Canada looked impressive annihilating the Americans 4-1 in their semi-final, and you figure if they continued playing that well, their best would be better than whatever best Russia could come up with.

Well, that's what I figured, anyway.

With a 3-0 lead heading into the third that would eventually result in a 5-3 loss for Canada, this might have to rank as the biggest choke job in World Junior history, at least for a gold medal game. They were on their heels, stopped hitting, the goalie couldn't stop anything...it was like they ran out of gas at the finish line. Perhaps the most telling of their play came with a Canadian powerplay near the end of the second period. The Canadians didn't muster any chances, and when Russia cleared their zone, Canada retrieved the puck in their own end...so....very...slowly. So slow, in fact, the arena organist though there was a stoppage in play and began playing over the loudspeakers. Oops. It was like the killer instinct the Canadians demonstrated against the States simply disappeared.

The end result was quite disappointing to say the least. Give Russia credit for being resilient and not giving up when they got to the third period. That final 20 minutes was supposed to be a mere formality to wrap up gold for Canada. Instead, the team will have some to think about what went wrong.

And perhaps if I wasn't so cocky about it, maybe Canada would have enjoyed a gold medal victory last night.