By Amy Tennery<\/p>\n
MILAN, Feb 9 (Reuters) \u2013 The United States and Canada will play with targets on their backs when the men\u2019s Olympic ice hockey tournament begins on Wednesday, as the National Hockey League\u2019s star \u200dplayers return to the Games for the first time in 12 years.<\/p>\n
The NHL ended its run of participation in five straight Games after Sochi 2014 and its return this year \u2013 with some 150 players from the league named to rosters \u2013 has made ice hockey the hottest ticket in town.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think any team here is thinking that this \u200cthing is going to be easy,\u201d said U.S. alternate captain \u200cCharlie McAvoy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of great countries here with a lot of world-class players and we\u2019re going to respect every opponent here.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NHL\u2019s return promises a best-on-best tournament \u2013 with the glaring omission of the NHL\u2019s top Russian players, who are banned from \u200bcompeting \u2013 as Canada and the United States\u2019 old rivalry is given new life.<\/p>\n
Canada are favoured with their \u201cgolden goal\u201d hero Sidney Crosby, who helped the hockey-obsessed \u200dnation take the top of the podium in \u200b2010 and 2014, back as captain, after they beat the \u200bAmericans in the 4 Nations Face Off tournament last year.<\/p>\n
But while the all-NHL Canada \u200dand U.S. teams will claim much of the spotlight, European challengers will be hungry to play the spoilers.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur strength is that we\u2019ve been playing together for many years now. The core group is largely the same,\u201d said Swiss winger Nino Niederreiter.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the other teams like the U.S. and Canada, they play in \u200dthe 4 Nations Face-Off, which is definitely going to help them glue the team together.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut at the same time, it\u2019s a group which just got put together, right? \u200dSo they haven\u2019t really \u200dexperienced playing with one another, so I think that \u200bcould be a potential weakness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finland will open the action on \u200bWednesday, kicking \u2060off their title defence against Slovakia, while hosts Italy \u2013 \u200cthe only one of the 12 teams without an active NHL player \u2013 will play the late match at the hastily completed Santagiulia arena.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal has to be that we improve with every game,\u201d said Italian goalkeeper Damian Clara. \u201cThe chance to win is zero if you don\u2019t play, and we\u2019re going to play.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in Milan; \u2060Editing by Alison Williams)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Amy Tennery MILAN, Feb 9 (Reuters) \u2013 The United States and Canada will play with targets on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-458235","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}