Olympic Hockey: Who (Or What) Is The Real Wild-Card?

By MIKE LOOMIS
Special To One Great Season

I love the Winter Olympics.

It is so much more bad-ass than the Summer Olympics.  You've got the luge, skiing with guns and curling. I know curling is nothing more than shuffleboard on ice, but if a senior citizen tried it he'd fall and break a hip or something. See? Bad-ass.

Opening ceremonies may have been on Friday, but the Olympics didn't officially start until Tuesday afternoon when the USA men's hockey team took the ice against Switzerland. Nothing is more intense than Olympic hockey. Nothing.

Olympic hockey is six different All-Star teams, except the players actually try. And saying they "try" is really selling the whole thing way short. It's the fastest, hardest-hitting and most amazing display of skill you will see anywhere.

It is generally accepted that Canada and Russia are the two teams to beat this year, and it's hard to argue with that, but I will try. Russia is fast. Real fast. But I don't know if fast is going to work on this ice. I was surprised at how poorly the ice held up in the USA-Switzerland game, but those conditions were partly why the Swiss were able to hold the Americans to just three goals, and why, later Tuesday, Norway was able to keep Canada scoreless for an entire period.
 
The sloppy ice slows everything down and evens the playing field a bit for the less-talented teams.  Making a case against Canada is a lot harder though. The Canadians are so well-rounded that they can play any style and win, and essentially playing on home ice only makes it that much harder to bet against them. 

It should be Canada winning the gold, but silver and bronze are a little harder to call because invariably, one pretty good team will ride a hot goalie en route to an upset win or two. In the 2006 games in Torino, the hot goalies were Switzerland's Martin Gerber and Finland's Antero Niittymaki. This year, fellow Fin Miikka Kiprusoff or Tomas Vokoun, of the Czech Republic, are the best bets to lead a surprise run. Even Peter Budaj might get hot for Slovakia.

Every one of the aforementioned teams has enough of a supporting cast to test the superpowers of Canada, Russia and Sweden. If the underdogs can keep their games close, crazy things can happen.

One of the more interesting storylines to me is the return of Peter Forsberg, who has spent this season back at home playing for MoDo. This will be his last Olympics, so we'll see if that has any impact on his play or that of his teammates. 

One more thing to keep in mind with Olympic play: goal differential is very important in seeding for the medal round, leaving one to wonder whether Tuesday's pedestrian 3-1 effort will come back to haunt Team USA.

The biggest wild-card in this tournament may not be a hot goalie or a veteran center. It could very well be how well the ice holds up, and what affect it will have on the teams that rely on speed and stick-handling to win. No matter what, I plan on savoring every Olympic hockey moment, because it won't get any better for four more years.

Mike Loomis is a freelance video editor in Cincinnati. Follow him on Twitter at @Loomis2.