The medal round is winding down, and we’re set for a busy day of semifinal action unfolding over in Milan. For the early crown, we’ll see Canada and Finland facing off in what we can call the Flyers bowl, which will see a pair of teammates from Philly in Travis Sanheim and Rasmus Ristolainen facing off for a chance to punch their ticket to the gold medal game. And then, later on, it’s the big on for the local crowd — the Americans will face off against the Slovaks in their push to join their counterparts on the women’s team as gold medalists. We’ll see soon how that all shakes out.
Puck drop: 10:40 a.m (CAN/FIN), 3:10 p.m. (USA/SVK)
How to watch:
📺: Peacock
Pregame reading
- The American women’s team came away with the gold medal yesterday, and the Flyers could do well to take some lessons from what they did in that performance. [BSH]
- And back home, Flyers prospect Oliver Bonk is also learning some good lessons, getting some work in with the big club in practice. [BSH]
- And Matvei Michkov is getting some encouragement to finish out the season strong. [BSH]
Canada vs. Finland
The first matchup of the day, as we mentioned off the top, will see two of the tournament’s powerhouses facing off, and both looking to come out with a little more punch than they delivered in their quarterfinal games. Now, neither of them played outright poorly, in fairness, but they ended up in much tighter games than they would have hoped, with both games requiring overtime to settle them, and Canada coming away with a more modest four-goal output in the win, and Finland with three.
This will be a tough matchup for each side no matter how you slice it, but in particular, the Canadians are going to have to overcome a pretty significant absence — after getting banged up in their last game, but still remaining a possibility to get back in for this one and having taken a couple of skates in the meantime, it’s been made official that they’ll be without Sidney Crosby for this one.
And here’s how things look like they’ll be lining up:
Celebrini – McDavid – Wilson
Horvat – MacKinnon – Jarvis
Marner – Suzuki – Stone
Marchand – Bennett – Hagel
Reinhart
Toews – Makar
Harley – Parayko
Sanheim – Doughty
Theodore
Binnington
(Thompson)
Lehkonen – Aho – Rantanen
Granlund – Hintz – Teräväinen
Luostarinen – Lundell – Kakko
Tolvanen – Haula – Armia
Lindell – Heiskanen
Mikkola – Ristolainen
Määttä – Matinpalo
Jokiharju
Lankinen
(Korpisalo)
USA vs. Slovakia
And to close things out, we’ll see the Americans and the Slovaks facing off in the final game of the afternoon. For this one, Slovakia will undoubtedly be coming into it riding high, as they’re coming off a huge 6-2 win over the Germans in their quarterfinal matchup, but this American team is in a whole other league, and they won’t be taken lightly. For their part, too, they’ll be looking to hit the ground running a little better in this one, and get their high-powered offense going again, after the Swedes were able to keep them largely quite contained in their quarterfinal game — they still came away with the win, of course, but it took overtime for them to do it too, and were held to just two goals in that game, which was their lowest single-game output of the tournament by a pretty significant margin. So this group will all but certainly be a particularly motivated one, and that will make for appointment viewing, to say the least.
And, before we go, the projected lineups:
Guentzel-Matthews-Boldy
B Tkachuk-Eichel-M Tkachuk
J Hughes-Larkin-Thompson
Miller-Nelson-Trocheck
Keller
Q Hughes-McAvoy
Slavin-Faber
Sanderson-Werenski
Hanifin
Hellebuyck
(Oettinger)
Slafkovsky – Ruzicka – Tatar
Kelemen – Pospisil – Regenda
Okuliar – Dvorsky – Hudacek
Liska – Sukel – Takac
Cingel
Fehervary – Nemec
Gernat – Cernak
Marincin – Ceresnak
Koch
Hlavaj
(Skorvanek)
