Sidney Crosby was taken out <\/a>midway through a 4-3\u00a0nail-biting quarterfinal overtime victory for the Canadians Wednesday at Milano Santaguilia Arena.<\/p>\nWhile the heavily favoured Canada opened the scoring less than four minutes in, thanks to a nifty Connor McDavid setup to teenage phenom Macklin Celebrini, Team Czechia stormed back with two goals to take a first-period lead.<\/p>\n
Lukas Sedlak got Czechia on the board, then star David Pastrnak struck on the power-play.<\/p>\n
For the first time since 2010 in Vancouver, Canada trailed in best-on-best Olympic action.<\/p>\n
Memories of Nagano 1998 danced in the ether. The last time these two countries met in a best-on-best Olympic elimination game, the Czechs eked out a 2-1 shootout win in the semifinals. Canada did not use Wayne Gretzky in a shootout.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis might be the best team ever,\u201d Pastrnak had warned Tuesday night. \u201cLet\u2019s put the respect aside a little bit and try to take their game to them. Offensively, their power is incredible.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cJust have to be a little stronger on pucks, play more in the O-zone and be more confident. You know, we have nothing to lose. So, we\u2019re gonna go out there and leave it all out there. As a team, we haven\u2019t played our best yet, so hopefully we will save it for tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, they did.<\/p>\n
The Czechs submitted their best effort of these Winter Games so far, and Canada needed a dominant second period \u2014 outshooting the underdogs 17-5 in the frame \u2014 and a power-play conversion of their own (Celebrini to McDavid to Nathan MacKinnon) just to tie the game.<\/p>\n
Czechia\u2019s Ondrej Palat sniped off the rush to restore Czechia\u2019s lead in the third.<\/p>\n
But Canada\u2019s Nick Suzuki countered with just 3:27 remaining in a hard-fought third period on a slot tip of a Devon Toews point shot.<\/p>\n
Canada\u2019s Mitch Marner\u00a0scored the winner.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sweet relief.<\/p>\n
Adversity has finally hit the Canadians \u2014 and hard. Crosby\u2019s status for Friday\u2019s game is so far unknown.<\/p>\n
As the tournament\u2019s top seed, Canada will face the lowest remaining seed in the semifinal.<\/p>\n
If Sweden (7) defeats the U.S. (2) Wednesday night, Canada will face Sweden.<\/p>\n
If not, Canada will get the winner of Finland\u2013Switzerland.<\/p>\n
Fox\u2019s Fast Five<\/p>\n
\u2022 Celebrini continues to wow. He became the first teenager to score in an elimination game in a best-on-best tournament, then got promoted to the top power-play unit in Crosby\u2019s absence.<\/p>\n
He helped set up the tying goal, picking up his eighth point and surpassing Evgeni Malkin (Russia, 2006) for most points by a teenager in an NHL-participation Olympics.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Czech starter Lukas Dostal didn\u2019t blink about the opportunity to take the crease less than 24 hours after defeating Denmark Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlaying in Europe before, we always played back-to-back. It was always Friday-Saturday or Saturday-Sunday. So, I have no problem with playing back-to-backs,\u201d the goalie stated.<\/p>\n
What about at the NHL level, though?<\/p>\n
\u201cActually, this season, I got pulled against Dallas in the middle of the game (an 8-3 loss on Dec. 20),\u201d the Anaheim Ducks star said. \u201cI walked to the tunnel and Q (Ducks coach Joel Quenneville) told me, \u2018Hey, be ready for tomorrow.\u2019 So, we played back-to-back, and then we won the game (4-3 versus Columbus). So, yeah, I\u2019ve done it before.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Nathan MacKinnon\u2019s original line remains an issue. He looks fantastic on those bump-up shifts with McDavid, but coach Jon Cooper hasn\u2019t found the best wingers for him yet.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Canada\u2019s power play fell to second in the tournament. They\u2019ve gone 5-for-12 (41.6 per cent), while the U.S. (3-for-7) is operating at 42.8 per cent.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Juraj Slafkovsky has led his tiny country back to the Olympic semifinal. He compared the accomplishment to the bronze medal Slovakia won in Beijing, sans NHLers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably 100 times better,\u201d Slafkovsky said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got the best players over here, and we managed to come here and go to the semifinals. It\u2019s big for me, big for our country, big for every supporter we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Added Erik Cernak: \u201cAmazing. Before the tournament, if we would say we\u2019re gonna make semifinals, probably people would laugh at you. But we did it, and it\u2019s not done yet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILAN \u2014 The face of Team Canada hobbled down the tunnel midway through the toughest test his group…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483647,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":["post-483663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483663","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=483663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}