Daniel Alfredsson said it better than we ever could, speaking with the CBC’s Elliotte Friedman after a tightly knit, 2-1 semifinal win over Finland.
“It was a chess match,” Alfredsson admitted, “more than that intense battle that everyone expected.”
Yes, people. “A chess match.” We woke up at 5 a.m. to watch “a chess match.”
We have heard the term invoked before after National Hockey League playoff games. Check that — after stultifying NHL playoff games. Of late, often involving the Los Angeles Kings.
Never before have we hurried from the press box to ice level after a marvellously exciting game, one that reminds how lucky one is to make a living watching hockey of this quality, and heard a coach or player describe it as a “chess match.” When they use that term, what they really mean is, “boring.”
But after about 30 minutes of Sweden-Finland, we could see the “chess match” quote coming from a mile away. As one reader tweeted midway thru the game, “Anthems are over. Why are both teams still lined up at the blue lines?”
The joke was, of course, that this was an absolute trap-fest. Fans were dealt a poor hand when Finland scored first, the rare bad goal on Henrik Lundqvist, because the Finns have the ability to play up-tempo hockey. But they never will once they get a lead.
With typically passive Swedish patience, however, Sweden methodically applied its skill advantage to this game until a chance squirted loose to Loui Eriksson. Then an Erik Karlsson power-play bomb slipped through Kari Lehtonen. From there, this became a lesson for those on this side of the ocean who believe the NHL should go to a bigger ice surface to alleviate what has become a crowded ice surface, as players and equipment grow bigger and faster.
Of the men we know who scout hockey in Europe on a regular basis, very few have ever belonged to the “bigger ice is better” school of thought. They always warned of how the European teams find it so much easier to defend on the larger ice, and watching Finland throughout this Olympic tournament, that sentiment was proven in spades.
Teemu Selanne gave us this primer on playing on the big ice before the Olympics began. His words, as it turns out, were prescient: “It’s harder to score,” he said. “(In the NHL), if you beat someone one-on-one, you almost (always) have a scoring chance. There, when you take the (defenceman) wide, you still have a long way to go to the net. Here, if you beat him one-on-one coming off the boards, you are three, four steps away from the net. The angles are so much worse there.”
Step around a defenceman coming off the half-wall at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, and you are two strides away from a decent shot on goal. It’s perhaps five strides on the Olympic surface, and that allows time for another defender to slip back and thwart the chance.
The shots on goal were 26-25 in favour of the Finns in this semifinal, but in some ways this game reminded of that six-game St. Louis-Los Angeles playoff series from last spring in which three of the games ended in a 2-1 score, while another was 1-0.
To some, it was classic, hard-nosed playoff hockey. To others, it was flat out dull. Not enough goals, not enough scoring chances. It was, as we recall, a pretty good debate.
To me, Los Angeles versus St. Louis was much like this Sweden-Finland semifinal: There’s nothing wrong with a 2-1 hockey game, until you can accurately predict the final score while you are driving to the rink before the game. This one had 2-1 written all over it ever since the quarterfinals ended.
“We were just trying to hang in at the end,” Alfredsson said. “We were still able to box them out.”
And there is the money quote: “Box them out.”
If we wanted to watch athletes box each other out, we would watch the NBA more than we do.
Win or lose, this tournament will not be remembered by Canadians to be as exciting as what we saw in Vancouver four years ago. It is because of the big ice — period — and should serve as a warning to the NHL.