2026 Olympic
Hockey
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Good morning to everyone except anybody who books a mandatory work meeting for Thursday afternoon. Seriously, go check your calendars right now. Did you do that? There’s still time to apologize and reschedule, because absolutely everyone’s got something better to do that day …
Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives. And now, it’s here. Or should I say, we’ve got Team Canada vs. Team USA for women’s hockey gold, baby. Puck drop is Thursday at 1:10 p.m. ET. (Full Olympics schedule, customized to your time zone, is here.)
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Full credit to Team Switzerland, which absolutely made Canada sweat it out in yesterday’s 2-1 win, but the (almost) inevitable gold medal matchup is here. And while we all knew this was probably coming, the path to get here has seen some surprises.
Most notably, this matchup no longer feels quite like the coin flip it usually is. If we’re stealing lines from Avengers movies, it’s Team USA that’s been playing Thanos for the last year, earning the role of favorites along the way. The Canada-USA rivalry has been uncommonly one-sided recently, with the Americans sweeping the four-game rivalry series late last year and then smoking the Canadians 5-0 in their round-robin matchup. Forget beating the Americans, hardly anyone can even score a goal on them.
So, is this one an easy call? Not so fast. For starters, Canada didn’t have Marie-Philip Poulin in that round-robin game; she’s back in the lineup now, and she’s one of the few players in the sport who can single-handedly tilt the odds. She also became the Olympics’ all-time leading goal scorer in yesterday’s win. And despite all of Team USA’s well-earned confidence, this is still Canada, winner of five of the last six gold medal showdowns between the two teams, including the most recent in 2022.
And maybe the biggest reason to play wait-and-see before simply handing gold over to the Americans: These two teams always seem to find a way to surprise us. Remember the utter madness of 2014? If we get even a fraction of that on Thursday, all bets are off.
Meanwhile, Sweden faces Switzerland for bronze at 8:40 a.m. ET on Thursday. Sweden has medaled twice in women’s hockey, including a surprise silver in 2006 that remains its most recent podium appearance. The Swedes were blown out by Team USA yesterday but will look to rediscover some of the momentum from their upset elimination of the Czechs. Switzerland has one medal in its history, a bronze in 2014, and should have some confidence after taking Team Canada to the brink.
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We have a few extra days to wait for the gold medal game on the men’s side; that doesn’t come until Sunday morning. But the path to get here is already in motion, with the playoff phase of the tournament starting today. From here on out, everything is an elimination game.
(Well, technically the two semifinals aren’t, because the losers of those games still get to play for bronze. But nobody came all this way after all these years to play for third place.)
To get you caught up, all 12 men’s teams make the playoff phase, with the top four getting a bye to tomorrow’s quarterfinals. The four teams with byes are Canada, the U.S., Finland and, in a mild surprise, Slovakia. Those teams aren’t in action today, but they’ll be watching to find out who they’ll play tomorrow.
The other eight teams are playing for their tournament lives. Two of those games are already over, and let’s pour one out for the tourney’s two underdog teams: Germany beat France, and Switzerland advanced against Italy. We’ll preview the other two games down below. (As a reminder, our forecast page is constantly updating as the tournament goes on. It’s glorious. Don’t miss the women’s page, either.)
The bigger picture: This tournament is wide open, but we’re still on track for the Canada-U.S. men’s final that everybody is rooting for, and by “everybody,” I mean the NHL’s marketing department. Those two teams came into the event as the favorites, and so far neither has stumbled enough to change that perception.
That said, seeding could matter more than we thought: A Team Sweden win this afternoon means it’d face the Americans in a battle of powerhouses worthy of a semifinal or even gold medal showdown. Instead, one of those teams would be knocked out of the medals entirely. Sweden still needs to take care of business to make it happen, but that’s where a lot of the attention will be today.
We’ll do this one “Who am I?” style.
I’m a Hockey Hall of Famer who had a long and successful NHL career. I played in two Olympics and represented two different countries in the process. I also competed in an additional best-on-best tournament, where I represented a third country. And my son, a successful NHLer in his own right, went to two Olympics of his own — and did so representing a fourth country. Who am I?
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A few hints: While not quite a generational superstar in the Mario Lemieux/Wayne Gretzky mold, this player is hardly obscure; he made the NHL’s all-time top 100 list, as well as The Athletic’s vastly superior NHL99 ranking. He’s the answer to at least one other reasonably famous trivia question. And finally, this player was mentioned in a couple of my recent columns, so you should be able to figure this out as long as you read everything I write.
The spotlight is on the men today, with the start of the elimination round. Germany and Switzerland are already through in the early games. That leaves us with two games on the day’s schedule, and both will be of interest to fans of Team Canada or Team USA.
📺 Denmark @ Czech Republic men
🕚 10:40 a.m. ET
🇺🇸 USA Network (joined in progress), Peacock
🇨🇦 CBC (joined in progress), Sportsnet, CBC Gem
This one will be ongoing or over by the time you read this newsletter. Don’t sweat it: You can catch up with our live coverage. Anyway, both teams finished the group stage with one win, although Denmark hung tough against Team USA for most of their meeting. The winner gets Team Canada tomorrow, which would be a Group A rematch for Czechia, which fell 5-0 in the first meeting.
The Danes will presumably turn to veteran Frederik Andersen to steal one here, or at least hold them in long enough to get the offense going; they’ve scored just eight goals so far, with three of those coming from ELH star Nick Olesen. The Czech offense has been largely driven by Martin Nečas, while David Pastrňák has just one goal in the tournament and Tomáš Hertl has been held pointless. Lukáš Dostál should get the start in goal.
📺 Latvia @ Sweden men
🕒 3:10 p.m. ET
🇺🇸 USA Network (joined in progress), Peacock
🇨🇦 CBC, TSN (joined in progress), Sportsnet, CBC Gem
It’s been a tough tournament so far for the Swedes, who came in as a medal favorite. Their loss to Finland put them at the bottom end of a three-way tie for Group B and produced a tougher path through the elimination phase. That said, they’ll still be heavy favorites over Latvia, which managed a win over Germany but should be out-gunned here. Only four different Latvian players managed to score in the round robin, so they’re likely to need a big game from goalie Artūrs Šilovs to have a chance.
The winner gets Team USA tomorrow. And while you never want to look too far ahead or count out an underdog, it’s OK to start penciling in some plans for a monster Sweden/USA clash that we didn’t think we’d see this early.
🥊 Wait, the guy from Team France who fought Tom Wilson got kicked out of the tournament by his own federation for egging on the crowd afterwards? Huh.
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😊 Shayna Goldman is back with an Olympic vibe check, including the mystery of why Filip Forsberg’s ice time is so low.
🥇 Your two favorite newsletter guys teamed up to rank all 14 realistic gold medal matchups that are still in play for the men.
👴 A 40-year-old trying to create a legacy. A 40-year-old trying to cement a legacy. A 38-year-old trying to add to a legacy. Mark Lazerus talked to three aging captains chasing different kinds of glory.
🦅 Meet the coach with his fingerprints all over the U.S. women’s and men’s Olympic hockey teams.
📖 The Athletic’s Julian McKenzie has an excellent new book out called “Black Aces: Essential Stories from Hockey’s Black Trailblazers,” and we’re running excerpts this week.
🤪 My close personal friend and co-worker Chris Pronger is back with another column, and he thinks there are five teams left on the men’s side that can win gold.
🎙️ “The Athletic Hockey Show” is going live on YouTube every day after the games are done, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube, or listen anytime wherever you get your podcasts.
We believe that in hockey, as in life, there are no dumb questions. So if you have something you’ve always wondered about the sport, ask away by emailing us at redlight@theathletic.com.
What does “FOGO” mean? I’ve heard the term used in NHL games and again recently at the Olympics, and I assume it stands for something, but they never explain what it means.
FOGO is a relatively recent addition to the hockey lexicon, and it does indeed stand for something. Specifically, it’s an acronym for “face off, get off.” In other words, a FOGO situation happens when a player is sent out to take a faceoff, with instructions to immediately come to the bench for a line change afterwards.
These days, you tend to hear it most often in the NHL at the start of three-on-three overtime. Strategy for the extra session has become far more structured over the years, with most teams choosing to focus on possession, including that annoying thing where they’d rather regroup in their own end than risk giving up the puck on a poorly chosen shot attempt. That’s made winning the opening faceoff especially important, as the team that wins might have the puck for several minutes.
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The problem, for at least a few teams, is their best faceoff guy isn’t really someone you want out there in the sort of wide-open, end-to-end hockey that overtime can turn into. So, they send out the faceoff guy, with orders to win the opening draw and then get off the ice so somebody with a little more offensive flair can get out there.
Outside of overtime, the same concept can apply, although it’s a little trickier. You’ll sometimes see a team use the strategy on a defensive draw, although that really only works if it wins the draw. It could make sense on a neutral-zone draw late in a game, too.
Basically, if you see a guy take a faceoff and then vanish, you can assume he’s been FOGO’d.
The player we were looking for was Peter Stastny. He was on the Czechoslovakian team in his first Olympics back in 1980, then was able to represent Slovakia by the time he returned in 1994. In between, he was part of Team Canada at the 1984 Canada Cup, as seen in the photo above. And his son Paul, despite being born in Canada, represented Team USA at the Olympics in 2010 and 2014.
(Stastny’s other trivia claim-to-fame is that he was the guy who ranked second to Gretzky in NHL scoring in the 1980s. He’s also one of the only players to score eight points in a game and made the cut in last week’s Olympic roster-building game.)
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Sean McIndoe has been a senior NHL writer with The Athletic since 2018. He launched Down Goes Brown in 2008 and has been writing about hockey ever since, with stops including Grantland, Sportsnet and Vice Sports. His book, “The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL,” is available in book stores now. Follow Sean on Twitter @DownGoesBrown
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