As an unabashed fan of hockey in general, and women’s hockey specifically, I always look forward to the Winter Olympics. Sure, the tournament is a bit predictable, with the United States and Canada the heavy, heavy favorites to meet in the finals (though I remember well Sweden knocking off the US of A in a shootout in 2006). But I bristle at the logic that the predictability of the finals is a knock on the women’s game.
First, it’s simply unfair to criticize these two programs because the rest of the world hasn’t accepted the challenge to improve their teams. I hope they will, much like other nations are catching up to the U.S. women’s national soccer team. In PyeongChang, Finland gave both Canada and the United States headaches in the opening rounds, and Russia (oh, sorry, Olympic Athletes from Russia), Switzerland and Japan all showed promise (though Sweden was a disappointment). So there’s hope.
But the crème de la crème is still Canada and the United States. For starters, an enormous shout out to American colleges and Title IX, which give many Canadians a chance to hone their game playing top-tier hockey south of the border. And I love the exquisite tension between these two super powers. Their matches aren’t so much "games" as they are "wars of attrition." Olympic fans have to remember the finals of the Sochi Olympics, when Kelli Stack (of Boston College fame) came within a few millimeters of icing the gold medal for the Americans, when her clearing shot hit the post of an empty Canadian net. Our northern neighbors took full advantage of their good fortune, tying the game in the last minute, then winning in overtime.
The gold-medal game this winter was every bit as good. Two incredibly talented teams, incredibly well-matched, going toe-to-toe, refusing to budge an inch. It was an epic match that couldn’t be decided in regulation. It wouldn’t be decided in overtime. It was decided in a sudden-death shootout (which I hate — a team game should never be decided by a skills contest). It was truly a game where both sides were deserving of gold.
So, before I say anything else, let me be clear about one thing: I think Canada’s Shannon Szabados is the best female goaltender on the planet. She was simply phenomenal throughout the Games, and in the final match against the United States. Canadian Geneviève Lacasse (the Providence College graduate who beat the Americans in the preliminary rounds), Finland’s Noora Räty, Switzerland’s Florence Schelling (the pride of Northeastern University) and the United States’ Maddie Rooney, Nicole Hensley and Alex Rigsby all performed admirably. But Szabados was, in my humble opinion, head and shoulders above her peers.
However, it’s the overtime shootout goal scored by USA’s Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson that I want to focus on. That tally delivered Olympic gold to the Americans for the first time since the women’s game was introduced to the Winter Games in 1998. It was a crazy good goal, leaving even verbose NBC analyst Pierre Maguire almost speechless.
"That’s electrifying," said McGuire immediately after Lamourex-Davidson scored. "That’s as good as you’re going to see anywhere."
It was a spectacular move. With the shootout score deadlocked, Lamoureux-Davidson skated in on the Canadian goal and faked a shot at the hash marks, and Szabados bit. Lamoureux-Davidson quickly moved the puck to her backhand. As Szabados started scrambling, Lamoureux-Davidson pulled the puck back to her forehand, and buried the puck past the goalie’s glove. Game, set, match and gold for the Americans (after Rooney denied Canada’s final shooter).
For the coach in me, though, the story behind the winning goal is even better. Reporter Brad Elliott Schlossman of the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota revealed that Lamoureux-Davidson first learned the move — dubbed "Oops, I did it again" — six years earlier. North Dakota associate coach Peter Elander, a native of Sweden, showed her and her twin sister, Monique, the move. Initially, both players struggled with it. But neither quit, putting in hour after hour of extra sessions, working to perfect it. "I did it thousands of times," Jocelyne told Schlossman. "Over and over and over."
That’s the lesson. According to Elander, who was nicknamed "The Professor" at UND, Lamoureux-Davidson’s commitment to her craft is why she could pull off that game-winning move in such a pressure-packed situation.
"In this generation, young people who don’t know how to do things correctly, they don’t want to do it," Elander told Schlossman. "If it takes a long time to perfect something, they don’t have the patience to do it.
"The Lamoureux sisters are outliers in that group. If they see something hard, they see it as a challenge to improve it," he said. "To be able to be not good at something, then work yourself into perfection at it, is almost a lost quality in today’s society."
Elander is absolutely right. We goalie coaches see this all the time, and I’m certain coaches in other sports see it just as often. Kids love to practice what they already do well. That’s human nature. But it doesn’t make you a better athlete, or a better goaltender.
What makes you better? Improving the parts of your game that aren’t strong. Your skating, your stickhandling, your fitness, your tracking, your recovery. It’s all important. If you want to be a complete goaltender, you need to dial in every aspect of the position. You can’t afford to ignore the weak spots. Of course, that requires extra work.
But it’s the outliers who make it to the Olympics.
POSTS & CROSSBARS
Since I’m yapping about the Olympics, let me get one more thing off my chest. The owners of the National Hockey League, and their mouthpiece commissioner, did their fans and the game a great disservice by not participating in the Winter Games. That action, in itself, is forgivable. They have that right, and they exercised it. No problem. Just do me a favor and stop with all the talk about "growing the game" or "caring about the game." Because you don’t. The players want to participate in the Olympics, and the fans want to see NHL players in the Olympics. It’s not even a contest. If you truly want to "grow the game" or "care about the game," that’s the way to do it. Allow the players to represent their countries once every four years and take a shot at Olympic gold.
As a Bruins fan, I’m still rooting for the Americans, but I love seeing Tuukka Rask guarding the Finland net, Zdeno Chara manning the Slovakian blue line or Patrice Bergeron employing his unparalleled two-way game for Canada. The argument that some folks trot out in defense of the owners is that the owners pay the players’ salaries. Wrong. The fans pay the players salaries. And the fans, by a wide majority, want the players in the Olympics.
The reality is that the owners are far more concerned about growing their business, and their bank accounts. "Growing the game" on the international level is not a priority (unless it means feathering their nest). All I’m asking is that they stop being so hypocritical about it. Fair enough?
