Team Canada and Team USA will face off Saturday night at the Bell Centre in the 4 Nations Face-Off and many in Canada are “hoping that the championship game next Thursday will be a Canada-U.S. rematch,” according to Brendan Kelly of the MONTREAL GAZETTE. Each team plays three games in the round-robin phase and the two top point-getters advance to the one-game final. There is “no question” President Trump’s recent “bellicose behaviour” toward his northern neighbor has “heightened the intensity around the Canada-U.S. game and it’ll be interesting to see how the Bell Centre crowd reacts Saturday night.” The fact is, and this “goes well beyond any Trump-related issues,” when a team hits the ice wearing red Team Canada jerseys, “we all suddenly come out of the closet as nationalists” (MONTREAL GAZETTE, 2/13). In Ottawa, Bruce Garrioch noted the Montreal fans booed the Star-Spangled Banner at the start and end of Thursday’s U.S.-Finland match. NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said that he was “hopeful those days were behind us.” Daly said, “It’s unfortunate and we wish it wasn’t the case.” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is hoping that the “temperature between the two countries will normalize soon and the fans will enjoy the game between Canada and the U.S. on Saturday” (OTTAWA CITIZEN, 2/13).
MISSING SOMETHING: In N.Y., Larry Brooks writes there was an “absence of the pomp and circumstance” that accompanied Wednesday’s Canada-Sweden opener of this 4 Nations Face-Off. There was also an “absence of electricity both on the ice and in the stands” for the U.S.-Finland match that had been “evident in the rink 24 hours earlier.” But there was “hockey, high-stakes, best-on-best hockey, even if it took quite the while for the Americans to get to their game and display superiority.” There has been “one team, and one team only,” representing the U.S. that has ever won a best-on-best tournament and that was the World Cup team of 1996 that took Games 2 and 3 of the of the best-of-three final over Canada. Brooks: “Everything will be ratcheted up Saturday. Hostility will be ratcheted up. Emotion will be ratcheted up. It will be the USA and Canada and oh, how the music will be blaring” (N.Y. POST, 2/14).
EXPERIMENTAL OUTCOMES: The AP’s Stephen Whyno wrote extending overtime to 10 minutes is “one of the experiments taking place at the tournament that could go into use as soon” as next NHL season. However, changing the rules would “require an agreement” between the NHL and NHLPA, though it is “good timing for that with collective bargaining talks ongoing and official negotiations on the horizon.” Adding more of a “workload without extra pay is a strike against extending OT, and it would tax the top players more than others.” The NHL is also using the tournament to try “adding 30 seconds to each of the three television timeouts every period and subtracting a minute from each of the two intermissions.” The 4 Nations is also using the international system of awarding three points for a regulation win, two for an overtime or shootout win, one for an overtime or shootout loss and none for a regulation loss. Changing the point system is the “least likely thing for the NHL” (AP, 2/13).
