Olympic Daily: Some quick thoughts on the semifinals

Two games remain and we know who will play for gold.

Two games remain in the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Finland will battle Slovakia for the bronze medal and Canada will play USA for the gold medal, it’s a rematch — if you can call it that — of the matchups from the 2010 where Canada won gold, USA took silver and Finland won bronze.

Friday’s game were a bit of a let-down for various reasons.

The USA-Slovakia game was a laugher, 5-0 before the end of the second period, while the Finland-Canada game was simply disappointing because of how it played out, even if the score was exciting and there were some dramatic moments.

Let me explain…

In many ways this was the game Finland was built for.

Leading 2-0 against Canada less than five minutes into the second period, courtesy of a Mikko Rantanen snipe and an Erik Haula shorthanded goal, Finland pulled the bus into the bunker and not only parked it, but removed the tires completely.

Canada, now famously, eventually came back and won the game 3-2, completing the comeback on a power play goal by Nathan MacKinnon with 36 seconds remaining.

Canada will play for gold on Sunday, Finland will have to settle for a bronze medal battle against Slovakia.

I have some very high praise for Finnish hockey, including some personal biases about how I think the Finnish model for development is better than the one we have in the United States, but I don’t think we can talk about this game without being a bit critical of the Finns.

Finland started playing to the score way too early in a 60-minute game. While a bunker defense makes sense in certain situations and potentially in the third period, the belief that a bunker would never be penetrated by that Canadian lineup was foolish.

And it’s not even about Finland potentially adding to a 2-0 lead, it’s the lack of any attempted push to even move the actionable area away from its own defensive zone. I love Esa Lindell’s game, but Finland allowed him to become the model for their game and as a group, Finland turned all potential zone exits into high flips and soft dumps.

Instead of embracing some of the puck movement ideologies, which saved it in the end against Switzerland last game, Finland decided to neuter the rest of its game to live on defense and a prayer.

It was almost funny watching this, because it felt very similar to what I saw from Dallas Stars in the Ken Hitchcock-Jim Montgomery-Rick Bowness eras. Playing to the score way too early and sucking life not only out of the game, but also out of any chance you had offensively.

On paper, Canada should have dominated possession in this game and you would have expected them to have a shot advantage. But that advantage should have been something in the five to seven shot advantage for Canada, rather than a 22-shot edge for the Canadians.

Finland had a chance to do more, could have, and simply didn’t by choice.