Which players will carry Olympic momentum to rest of regular season?

The Olympics are in the books, with Team USA taking gold medal in a dramatic overtime thriller over Team Canada.

While Team USA’s heroes, including Connor Hellebuyck of the Winnipeg Jets and Jack Hughes of the New Jersey Devils, are looking like long shots to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs, it’s inevitable that several players who performed well in Milan will be able to bring that positive momentum with them back to the NHL season and into the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

On Sunday’s Daily Faceoff Olympic postgame show, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk, Jonny Lazarus and Jeff Marek along with co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed which players can bring the momentum they generated during the Olympic tournament back with them to the NHL with the playoffs under two months away.

Jeff Marek: We head into the NHL season next and I do wonder, for some teams we made a lot about Kevin Fiala and that situation… we wonder about Josh Morrissey with the Winnipeg Jets here now too. He didn’t play after that first game where he had to leave. Who do you guys think this tournament helps most in the NHL? Are there a couple of players that you look at and you think, “Okay, you know what, wind in their sails.” Wind in their sails now, they’ve had a great tournament, carry this over. I guess the obvious one is Connor Hellebuyck, if you’re a Winnipeg Jets fan, but the Jets are so far out of it right now. I don’t know how much of that might just be a pyrrhic victory. Other players in this tournament that we all saw that we went, “You know what, this is really going to help him.” And by extension his team, when we get back to NHL games?

Tyler Yaremchuk: I’ll go outside of this game. If you’re a Montreal Canadiens fan, do you not watch what Juraj Slafkovsky again at another Olympics… and we’ve talked about him. how he is such a necessary piece of that lineup because he’s so much different than Suzuki and Caufield, and he’s got the beef to kind of maybe power you in a playoff series. And if you’re a Canadians fan, you’re sitting there going, “Man, we’re hopefully going to have some long playoff runs in the next few years.” And you now know in the back of your mind that Juraj Slafkovsky is not going to cower at any big moment.

Jonny Lazarus: I’m going outside this game as well, but I’ll bring it inside this game too, and the guy that I loved watching was Marty Necas. I always knew Necas was like a good solid player. You know, I watched a number of New York Rangers vs. Carolina Hurricanes playoff series where he was good, but he was not that game-breaker, right? We always talk about Carolina missing the game-breaker. Now he goes to Colorado. He’s had a hell of a year. North of 20 goals, north of 60 points, but everyone’s saying, “Yeah, he’s a great player, but he’s alongside MacKinnon and Makar and on a loaded Colorado Avalanche team.” In this tournament, he was dominant. He was by far Czechia’s best player. He went up against a really good Canadian team, and he was the best player on the ice, I thought, in that entire game, New was the guy over Pasta. So for me, it does a lot for Necas.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…