The United States routed Slovakia 6-2 on Friday to advance to the gold-medal game at the Milan Cortina Olympics, where it will face Canada.<\/p>\n
The rivals are now set to collide in the Olympic men’s hockey final for the first time since 2010. Canada is 2-0 against the U.S. in gold-medal games all time, with triumphs in 2002 and 2010.<\/p>\n
Canada beat the United States 3-2 in overtime in the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game in 2025. The event was the first best-on-best tournament featuring NHL players since the 2014 Olympics.<\/p>\n
Jack Hughes<\/a> led the way for Team USA with two goals against Slovakia. Dylan Larkin<\/a>, Tage Thompson<\/a>, Jack Eichel<\/a>, and Brady Tkachuk<\/a> also found the back of the net.<\/p>\n Thompson didn’t play in the third period for precautionary reasons.<\/p>\n Connor Hellebuyck<\/a> made 22 saves. He has a .947 save percentage across five starts in the tournament.<\/p>\n With under two minutes remaining, Matthew<\/a> and Brady Tkachuk<\/a>, along with Erik Cernak<\/a>, were assessed 10-minute misconducts for unsportsmanlike conduct after a scrum.<\/p>\n Juraj Slafkovsky<\/a> and Pavol Regenda<\/a> netted Slovakia’s goals. Both came in the third period after the Americans had pulled out to a commanding 5-0 lead.<\/p>\n Earlier Friday, Canada beat<\/a> Finland 3-2 in the other semifinal by erasing a 2-0 deficit and taking the lead on Nathan MacKinnon<\/a>‘s dramatic go-ahead goal with 35 seconds left.<\/p>\n Both teams are undefeated in the tournament.<\/p>\n The gold-medal game will be Sunday at 8:10 a.m. ET.<\/p>\n Slovakia will take on Finland in the bronze-medal game Saturday at 2:40 p.m. ET. Finland is the defending gold medalist, while Slovakia won bronze in 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States routed Slovakia 6-2 on Friday to advance to the gold-medal game at the Milan Cortina…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-489806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489806","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=489806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}