Sweden heads into the showdown with the U.S. after a win where it looked like the team that was considered one of the favorites for the gold medal when the Olympics began.<\/p>\n
Mika Zibanejad<\/a>, William Nylander<\/a> and Gabriel Landeskog<\/a> each had a goal and an assist, Filip Forsberg<\/a> and Adrian Kempe<\/a> also scored, Lucas Raymond<\/a> had three assists, and Jacob Markstrom<\/a> made 20 saves for Sweden to get his second win in as many games after serving as Filip Gustavsson<\/a>\u2019s backup for the first two games.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like the chemistry showed up tonight,\u201d Karlsson said. \u201cI think it was our most complete game as a team. It felt like everyone did what they needed to do.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd hopefully, that can be a positive thing for us and like I said, and the end of the day, we came to play the bigger nations and tomorrow we get that opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked what was working well, Zibanejad said, \u201cI think just the fundamentals of the game. The forecheck, the way we defend. I think just putting ourselves in a good spot when we don\u2019t have the puck. That\u2019s getting better and better and clearer. Little by little it\u2019s been getting better so that\u2019s a good sign.\u201d<\/p>\n Elvis Merzlikins<\/a> made 23 saves and Eduards Tralmaks<\/a> scored for Latvia, which leaves Milan with one win in four games.<\/p>\n \u201cDefinitely disappointed,\u201d Latvia forward Zemgus Girgensons<\/a> said. \u201cGoing out with a loss is never easy. I think overall, we held it together pretty well. It was small breaks of chances that we gave up that we probably could have eliminated. When it is teams like this, you know they will capitalize on the mistakes. This is a game of mistakes in a tournament like this.\u201d<\/p>\n Sweden jumped out to an early lead with Kempe and Landeskog scoring 41 seconds apart in the first period thanks to some fortuitous bounces.<\/p>\n Latvia\u2019s Teddy Blueger<\/a> tried to make a pass out of his defensive zone, but the puck hit the skates of Nylander and went to the stick of Sweden teammate Joel Eriksson Ek<\/a>, whose shot on goal hit Kempe\u2019s right skate and went in for a 1-0 lead at 10:55.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sweden heads into the showdown with the U.S. after a win where it looked like the team that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474787,"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-475190","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\/475190","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=475190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}