One team celebrated a loss, another team pulled its goalie leading by two goals in the final 39 seconds, and another team set the record for most goals in a game.<\/p>\n
When the dust had finally settled, Team Finland was an 11-0 winner against Team Italy, resulting in Team Slovakia winning the group and Team Sweden falling to at least seventh in the 12-team field for the single-elimination stage of the tournament.<\/p>\n
Confused? You\u2019re not alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tried to figure it out,\u201d Finnish defenseman Olli Maatta<\/a> said after his team\u2019s romp over the host country put them in strong position to win the one wild card and get a bye to the quarterfinals.<\/p>\n By the time Finland took the ice at 4:40 p.m. local time, the formula was quite simple. Though the Finns couldn\u2019t win the group no matter how many goals they scored, a win in regulation would give Slovakia the group and drop rival Sweden to third. Finland also knew the more it scored, the better the chances of getting the wild card.<\/p>\n And scored it did.<\/p>\n Kaapo Kakko<\/a> had two goals and an assist, Mikael Granlund<\/a>, Sebastian Aho<\/a> and Joel Kiviranta<\/a> each scored twice, Artturi Lehkonen<\/a> had a goal and two assists, and Joel Armia<\/a> and Miro Heiskanen<\/a> each had a goal and an assist for Finland (2-0-1-0), which finished second in the group.<\/p>\n Fourteen players had at least one point to help Finland win for the second straight day, following a 4-1 win against Sweden on Friday.<\/p>\n Mikko Rantanen<\/a> had three assists, and Niko Mikkola<\/a>, Rasmus Ristolainen<\/a>, Eetu Luostarinen<\/a> and Erik Haula<\/a> each had two assists. Juuse Saros<\/a>, playing each end of the back-to-back, made 15 saves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One team celebrated a loss, another team pulled its goalie leading by two goals in the final 39…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-475441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}