On Saturday, Team Canada suffered its first defeat at the 2017 IIHF World Hockey Championships, falling 3-2 in overtime to Switzerland in a shocker.
It is, of course, not the first time the Canadians have fallen victim to an underdog at a major international event. In fact, Switzerland has beaten the Red and White on a few occasions over the years and this was the third time they’d triumphed at the world championships.
Usually when Canada gets upset it’s because the other side enjoyed game-stealing play from a goaltender. Against the Swiss on Saturday, however, starter Jonas Hiller was pulled 6:28 into the game after allowing two goals. The real star for the Swiss side was Toronto Maple Leafs prospect Fabrice Herzog, who scored twice, including the overtime winner.
It was Canada’s first loss of the round robin this year and since there is no risk of the loss eliminating them from medal contention, it’s not among the biggest upsets in Canadian men’s hockey history. But it was a surprise nonetheless.
Here are some of the most shocking losses in Canadian men’s hockey history:
1936 Olympics, 2-1 Great Britain, gold-medal game
The Games, hosted by Germany, were the first in which Canada didn’t claim hockey gold. The Canadians won each of the first four Olympic golds, but fell by a slim margin to the British this time.
It was a blow to Canadian pride, but if there is a silver lining it’s that the British had a roster with a fair number of Canadian players.
A few years ago, the Toronto Sun revisited this first great defeat and a Canadian Press file from the event on the British goalie:
“There was no greater star in these games than Jimmy Foster of Winnipeg. It was Foster who won the hockey championship for England, who took the title away from his own Canada for the first time in history. It was he who directly brought about the most amazing upset of these games.”
This wasn’t a gold-medal game as we know it today, but the first in a round robin that also included the United States and Czechoslovakia. The Canadians and British didn’t lose any of their other games, so they finished first and second.
The Canadians won gold again in the next two Olympics (1948 and 1952), before going on a 50-year drought.
1981 Canada Cup, 8-1 USSR, championship final
It’s not really a shock when the Soviets or Russians beat Canada, but the 1981 Canada Cup final was surprising in how lopsided it was.
Canada, with tournament-leading scorer Wayne Gretzky plus Mike Bossy, Mike Gartner, Guy Lafleur, Bryan Trottier and more, came into the one-game final looking to defend their tournament title from 1976.
The final was played at The Forum in Montreal and although the Canadians held a 12-4 shot advantage in the first period, it was scoreless after one before the Soviets took a 3-1 lead through two periods. From there, the game got completely out of hand and, led by a natural hat trick from Sergei Shepelev and a stellar, tournament-MVP effort from goalie Vladislav Tretiak, the Soviet Union came away with a stunning 8-1 win.
1998 World Junior Hockey Championship, 6-3 Kazakhstan, seventh-place game
Dubbed “The Game No One Saw” and given an excellent description in this Sportsnet illustration, the most disastrous WJC in Canadian history ended with perhaps the most embarrassing loss in the country’s hockey history.
After a 2-2 preliminary-round record that put them fourth place in their pool, Canada drew the undefeated Russians, who had a 22-6 goals for/against differential, in the first medal-round game. It was a tightly contested game that ended 2-1 in favour of Russia after a Maxim Afinogenov overtime goal. Facing a scenario where they could finish no better than fifth, the Canadians were shut out by the Americans 3-0, and matched up against lowly Kazakhstan in the seventh-place game.
The Kazakhs came out of the preliminary round with a minus-21 goal differential and then lost 14-1 to Finland and 5-1 to Switzerland to end up against Canada in this game. Canada’s tournament was a lost cause at this point, but should have ended in a win. Instead, it was a national catastrophe.
Coming into the tournament, Canada had won five gold medals in a row at the WJC, the longest run of success by any country ever at the event. But the 6-3 loss to Kazakhstan, where the Canadians scored all their goals in a desperate third period, helped encourage a “hockey summit” where the country’s leaders in the sport gathered to discuss the future of the game and how to restore Canada’s supremacy.
1998 Olympics, 2-1 SO Czech Republic, semifinal
The Canadians had not won Olympic hockey gold since 1952, as the Soviet Union would effectively send their pro-level players who maintained amateur status and dominated the Games for decades. So, when NHLers played for the first time in 1998, it opened up the door for Canada to send its top players in a best-on-best event.
With a roster that included Gretzky, Brendan Shanahan, Ray Bourque, Patrick Roy, Joe Sakic and others, the Canadians entered the Nagano Olympics as the favourite. They got through the preliminary round with a perfect 3-0 record and went through Kazakhstan 4-1 in the first game of the medal round, moving to the semifinal.
There, they met possibly the best goalie of his generation in Dominik Hasek, who more than lived up to his “The Dominator” nickname in a stellar display that will be remembered for years to come.
After both sides went scoreless through two periods, Jiri Slegr opened the scoring for the Czechs midway through the third, and then they kept it on lockdown and were less than two minutes away from moving on before Eric Lindros scored with 1:03 left to tie it.
Overtime solved nothing, but Hasek stole the show in the shootout, turning aside all five Canadian shooters (Theo Fleury, Bourque, Joe Nieuwendyk, Lindros and Shanahan) to move on to the gold-medal game. Adding salt to the wound, and a minor controversy that rings today, was the fact that Canada head coach Marc Crawford opted against using Gretzky in the shootout.
“I don’t know if I would’ve scored or not scored,” Gretzky told Sportsnet in 2014. “As a team, you root for your teammates.
“When (the Czechs) scored that one goal, I was praying that one guy from our team would score, and I was praying that I would be the sixth guy picked to hopefully score that goal. Had I been picked and missed, we wouldn’t be talking about it today.”
And, to make it even worse, Canada dropped the bronze-medal game to Finland, finishing fourth overall at the first NHL Olympics.
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