By Janina Nuno Rios and Amy Tennery<\/p>\n
MILAN, Feb 14 (Reuters) \u2013 The United States have yet to live up to their full potential on a tight timeline to \u200breach the Olympic podium in Milan but forward Brady \u200cTkachuk assured fans the men\u2019s ice hockey medal contenders would find their rhythm.<\/p>\n
Widely seen as the likeliest challengers to powerhouse Canada, the all-NHL American team overcame Denmark 6-3 in a surprisingly close Group C contest at \u200cSantagiulia \u200bArena on Saturday, coming back from a \u20602-1 deficit after the \u2060first period.<\/p>\n
The United States, who beat Latvia 5-1 in their Thursday opener, play Germany while Denmark play Latvia on Sunday in the final two Group C games.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of those \u200bquick tournaments that you kind of have to find it quick and I think that\u2019s what\u2019s good about our group, \u2060we\u2019re just kind of scratching at \u2060it right now and it\u2019s going to work \u200bout that we\u2019re going to peak at the right time,\u201d predicted Tkachuk, \u200bwhose goal early in the second period helped spark \u200cthe U.S. fight back.<\/p>\n
\u201c(We\u2019re) finding chemistry and building off that,\u201d added Tkachuk, who plays for the National Hockey League\u2019s Ottawa Senators and is part of two sets of brothers on the \u2060U.S. Olympic squad.<\/p>\n
The contest on Saturday opened with a perplexing miss by U.S. goalie Jeremy Swayman, who lost track of the puck as it \u2060slipped by him \u200cearly in the first period. But the \u2060Boston Bruins netminder said he never lost the \u200bsupport \u200cof his team mates.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe confidence didn\u2019t waver \u2013 didn\u2019t \u200bwaver with \u2060myself, didn\u2019t waver with anyone on the team. That\u2019s why this is such an elite group,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cI think it\u2019s good to go through adversity. You don\u2019t want to, but it\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Amy Tennery and Janina Nuno Rios in Milan; Editing \u200bby Bill Berkrot)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Janina Nuno Rios and Amy Tennery MILAN, Feb 14 (Reuters) \u2013 The United States have yet to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469351,"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-469350","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\/469350","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=469350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}