I think they haven’t forced things. They’ve committed to staying with it and playing the game the right way. And to me, that’s the most important thing that that team has to do to win.<\/p>\n
Don’t try to do too much. Don’t try to overpower guys. Just play the right way. And eventually, you get your chances. Eventually you’ll be able to wear teams down and take advantage of the talent that they do have.<\/p>\n
They did that, and now they enter the knockout round as the second seed. They scored 16 goals and allowed five. Hey, give Team Canada (3-0-0-0) credit for finishing as the top seed and a plus-17 goal differential but that doesn’t take away from how the United States played.<\/p>\n
Here’s what I mean.<\/p>\n
Sure, the U.S. entered play against Team Germany on Sunday knowing Canada had a plus-10 goal-differential advantage on them, but they didn’t come out trying to run-and-gun and make up that deficit all at once.<\/p>\n
It would have been easy for them to say: “We’ve got to win by 10 goals, or we’ll finish second and might have to play Team Sweden in the quarterfinals.” And I think, from that standpoint, what I liked a lot about their eventual 5-1 win against Germany is they played the right way to create their chances. They didn’t try to say, “OK, we’ve got to score four goals in the first period so we’re in a position where at the end of the game we can win by 10 to win to get the No. 1 seed.”<\/p>\n
I think it was far more important that they played the game methodically and shift by shift. I think that was obviously the message that the coaches sent, because I thought the chances they created in the first period were off forechecks. They used good defensive posture to create offense, so I don’t think they cheated the game and tried to open up. And so, I think that, for one, shows the respect that the U.S. has for the tournament.<\/p>\n
They stuck to their blueprint. It was like: “Whoever we draw, that’s who we draw. We’re in a position that we can beat anybody.”<\/p>\n
I think that’s a great attitude to have. You have to beat anybody and everybody to win anyway, so I think that was the focus. I don’t think before the game the coaches said: “We have to win by 10 today. I don’t think that was part of any game plan.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I think they haven’t forced things. They’ve committed to staying with it and playing the game the right…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-479283","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\/479283","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=479283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}