After emerging as one of Sweden’s top goalies, Gustavsson went through another learning experience when he played at the 4 Nations Face-Off last season. In two games in the tournament, he was 0-0-1 with 4.19 GAA and .813 save percentage. He stopped 24 of 28 shots in a 4-3 overtime loss to Canada before leaving a 4-3 overtime loss Finland because of an illness after allowing two goals on four shots in the first period.<\/p>\n
Despite the results, Gustavsson believes playing in his first best-on-best tournament will be invaluable for him if he’s picked to Sweden’s Olympic team.<\/p>\n
“The world championship, you have a lot of NHL players there, but usually the best ones are still in the (Staney Cup) playoffs,” Gustavsson said. “For 4 Nations, all the best ones were there. It probably was the quickest hockey I ever played, and so much skill, so a very big challenge.<\/p>\n
“Now, I know what level I have to get up to play (in the Olympics), and I know what speed I’m going to expect from all the games there.”<\/p>\n
Although Sweden doesn’t have a goalie with Lundqvist’s established resume, it has depth with Gustavsson, Jacob Markstrom<\/a> of the New Jersey Devils, Linus Ullmark<\/a> of the Ottawa Senators and Samuel Ersson<\/a> of the Philadelphia Flyers. Gustavsson’s 23-year-old rookie teammate Jesper Wallstedt<\/a> has also played himself into the conversation by going 6-0-2 with a 1.94 GAA, .945 save percentage and two shutouts to begin this season.<\/p>\n Sweden national team coach Sam Hallam acknowledged it will be a difficult but important decision to select three goalies from that group for Milano Cortina.<\/p>\n “Henrik was the clear No. 1 for a long, long time both for the Rangers and the national team,” Hallam said. “We have a different situation now where we have more starting goalies in the League, which is in a way good. So, what we’ve said to all of them is just, ‘The spots are up for grabs, so you do your thing, you play your game and, hopefully, we’re going to have a few goalies that are playing really well.'”<\/p>\n Gustavsson’s focus is on helping the Wild win. He said his approach to making the Olympic team is simply, “Just trying to play my best and then, hopefully, get a call.”<\/p>\n That call would mean a lot, though.<\/p>\n “I have won the world championship with [Sweden] before (in 2018),” Gustavsson said. “The Olympics is even bigger, so having the chance to do that would be very honorable.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After emerging as one of Sweden’s top goalies, Gustavsson went through another learning experience when he played at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-309692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}