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View Full Version : Debacle on ice: Team USA falls apart in crunch



LionDen
02-23-2006, 05:18 PM
On 26th anniversary of 'Miracle,' U.S. hockey shows no spark, teamwork

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Team USA assistant captain Mike Modano has gone so far as to suggest the organization needs "new blood" at the top, and total overhaul makes sense after this performance, NBCSports.com columnist Mike Celizic writes.

TURIN, Italy - They trudged off the ice, their uniforms and equipment soaked in sweat, their faces perfect masks of defeat. On their backs they carried a legacy of celebrating the anniversary of the greatest day in U.S. Olympic hockey with one of the worst performances ever.

This was the best team that USA Hockey could put together from the best American players in the NHL, and all it could muster in eight days of play was one win, one tie, four defeats, and elimination from the tournament.

There will be no medals for this group, no homecoming celebrations, no commercial endorsements, no book contracts and no movie deals.

There has been no shortage of failures for the United States in Turin. But there has been none as monumentally embarrassing as this one. Falling, as it did, on the 26th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid makes it that much worse.

It’s easy to say now the expectations for this team weren’t very high and the team met them. Its roster was top-heavy with aging veterans who had to battle jet lag and a torrid schedule that had them playing six games in eight days. It didn’t have a premier goaltender. It wasn’t considered one of the elite teams in the tournament.

But it’s not the losing, but how the team lost that makes this one so bad. When NHL players first came to the Olympics in 1998, the U.S. team partied its way out of the medal round. Four years later, it won silver in a classic battle with Canada. This year, it simply fell apart when it mattered most.

They could have beaten Finland if they had played with intensity and purpose. But that was too much for them.

When it needed energy, it delivered lethargy. When it needed discipline, it committed dumb penalty after dumb penalty.

The final score was 4-3, which doesn’t look bad. And the loss was to Finland, which went undefeated in the preliminary round. But this wasn’t a game the Finns so much won as one that the United States gave away.

“We didn’t have the pop and energy,” coach Peter Laviolette said. He couldn’t say why, and refused to agree that perhaps younger legs would have helped in a tournament so condensed.

Center Mike Modano, an assistant captain and one of the team’s biggest stars, felt that USA Hockey, which this year produced a women’s team that failed to get to the gold-medal game for the first time ever and the men’s team that played so poorly when it mattered most, needs “new blood” at the top.

Modano was a walking billboard for everything that went wrong. He centered the team’s top line, yet in the third period, when the United States finally played with the desperation of a group facing elimination, he never got on the ice, benched by Laviolette for no intelligible reason.

“You’ll have to ask Peter,” Modano said of his benching.

“It wasn’t about Mike Modano,” Laviolette said. “We wanted guys out there that had jump.”

Debacle on ice: Team USA falls apart in crunch

Modano complained about being flown in and then having to find hotel rooms and tickets for family members who came to watch the games. USA Hockey offered no help with any of those things, he said, and it was a major distraction.

It’s clear the team also needed more youngsters. Laviolette implied that Modano didn’t have a jump in his step, but the coach kept rolling ancient Keith Tkachuk into the game, and Tkachuk responded with dumb penalties and bad play.

“We did not play that well as a team,” forward Brian Rolston sid. “I don’t know if we were nervous or what. We didn’t get it done.”

Rolston also said the team never really jelled. You can blame that, if you wish, on the fact that the team played its first game a day after arriving in Turin, so the players really didn’t even have time to practice together. But it’s the same for every other team here, so that’s hardly an excuse.

And there really is no excuse for 1-4-1 any more than there’s an excuse for virtually every player choosing the quarterfinal match with Finland as the game in which to play their worst. From the bad penalties to the soft goals yielded by goalie Rick DiPietro, this one was a total team effort — or lack of same.

It’s not much of a legacy, especially when you compare it to the example set by a bunch of amateurs 26 years ago in Lake Placid. Laviolette said that there will never be another Miracle on Ice. That performance was utterly unexpected. Today, he said, “The expectation should be to come here and win a gold medal.”

That’s not easy, given the parity in hockey around the world, and to win another gold medal would be “a tremendous accomplishment.”

But it’s not going to happen with this kind of play. It’s not going to happen with one of the team’s best players sitting on the bench. It’s not going to happen with players distracted by having to find hotels and tickets for wives and children, parents and friends. It’s not going to happen with the sloppy play we saw against Finland.

They didn’t need a miracle, just dedication, desire and discipline. And they couldn’t find it.

“We were on our heels,” Laviolette said, summing it up perfectly. “They were on their toes.”

Mike Celizic writes regularly for MSNBC.com and is a freelance writer based in New York