MILAN — Here is what’s clear with Team Sweden for its opener of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 — somebody has to start in goal.<\/p>\n
Who that is, however, is still a mystery.<\/p>\n
For the third straight day, coach Sam Hallam would not reveal who will be in goal when the Swedes play Team Italy on Wednesday (3:10 p.m. ET; Peacock, USA, ICI TOU.TV, CBC Gem, SN, RDS).<\/p>\n
“We announce that when we put out the roster tonight,” Hallam said after Sweden’s morning skate.<\/p>\n
The choices are Filip Gustavsson<\/a> or Jesper Wallstedt<\/a> of the Minnesota Wild, or Jacob Markstrom<\/a> of the New Jersey Devils.<\/p>\n After Sweden plays Italy on Wednesday, it has back-to-back games against Finland and Slovakia on Friday and Saturday.<\/p>\n “I mean we have a plan,” Hallam said. “We play today and then we have a practice day tomorrow and then we play Finland, so it could be that you start tonight, you start Finland and then it’s a back-to-back, so maybe a good opportunity to change and get a second goalie in, but you have a plan.<\/p>\n “But something can happen in the first shift tonight that breaks the plan, someone could wake up with a sore throat.”<\/p>\n The front-runner would appear to be Gustavsson, who is 20-9-6 for the Wild this season with a 2.64 goals-against average and .907 save percentage in 36 games (35 starts).<\/p>\n The 27-year-old from Skelleftea started the first two games of the 4 Nations Face-Off against Canada and Finland, each an overtime loss, but left after giving up two goals on four shots in the first period against Finland because of an illness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILAN — Here is what’s clear with Team Sweden for its opener of the Olympic Winter Games Milano…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-473073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473073","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=473073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}