MILAN — Team Sweden faces a gauntlet at the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.<\/p>\n
Seeded seventh after the preliminary round, the Swedes enter the single-elimination portion of the men’s hockey tournament needing to defeat Team Latvia and Team USA on back-to-back days to reach the semifinals.<\/p>\n
Do that, and they could have to face Team Canada.<\/p>\n
“That’s what the Olympics are all about,” forward Filip Forsberg<\/a> said.<\/p>\n Sweden plays Latvia in the qualification playoffs at Santagiulia Arena on Tuesday (3:10 p.m. ET; Peacock, USA, ICI Tele, CBC Gem), with the winner advancing to play the United States in the quarterfinals there Wednesday (3:10 p.m. ET; Peacock, CBC Gem).<\/p>\n A loss would to Latvia would be Sweden’s most disappointing in the Olympics since the shocking 4-3 loss to Team Belarus in the quarterfinals at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. In a way, it would be worse. The Swedes have never been eliminated from an Olympic tournament with NHL players before the quarters.<\/p>\n Latvia defeated Sweden 3-1 in the quarterfinals of the 2023 IIHF World Championship. Sweden coach Sam Hallam was behind the bench for that tournament too, but doesn’t read much into it. One player on Sweden’s Olympic roster, Detroit Red Wings forward Lucas Raymond<\/a>, played that game. It was before 9,200 fans in Riga, Latvia. The Swedes had a 41-15 advantage in shots.<\/p>\n “This is a completely different group,” Hallam said. “And if we look at the last two Worlds, many of these players played against Latvia, and we’ve done pretty decent performances.”<\/p>\n Sweden defeated Latvia 7-2 in Ostrava, Czech Republic, in 2024 and 6-0 in Stockholm in 2025, each time in the preliminary round.<\/p>\n Still, the Latvians are dangerous.<\/p>\n Pittsburgh Penguins goalie Arturs Silovs<\/a> made 40 saves when Latvia upset Sweden at the 2023 Worlds, and he’s one of the options at the Olympics with Elvis Merzlikins<\/a> of the Columbus Blue Jackets.<\/p>\n “Good goaltending duo,” Sweden forward Filip Forsberg said. “Whoever they [start] is going to be good. Defensively structured team. A lot of them play together for a lot of the year, too, so there will be good chemistry. Big challenge, for sure.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILAN — Team Sweden faces a gauntlet at the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. Seeded seventh after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-479156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479156","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=479156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}