This game decides one of the entrants for the Gold Medal game. Canada severly outclasses Belarus, a massive talent differential. Its tied right now 1-1 with 3 minutes left in the first period.
Canada is dominating, 4-1, they'll be in the Gold Medal game, so I'm derailing my own thread. Olympic Hockey is awesome - why won't the NHL adopt some of the Olympic rules(wider rink, automatic icing)?
7-1 Canucks! WOOO! Man is this country into this! Half our school jammed into the library to watch the game today ... now the streets are filled with Canadian flags and patriotic honking everywhere. EVERYONE is talking about it. I can't imagine how loud its gonna get when we win gold on Sunday! Azim da Dream
A bigger ice surface has been talked about for a long time. Hockey used to be this exciting, because the talent level was much lower overall and the players were on average much smaller and slower, so there was room to move and make plays. (It was pretty much just us Canadians until about 20 years ago after all.) When the game became a lot more bump and stumble because the players were running out of room, there was quite a bit of talk about increasing the ice size. There were two main problems with this. First, many rinks of the day were of a fixed size and some were even smaller than the current NHL size (the old Boston and Chicago rinks). The second was that it was thought that Americans weren't, by and large, sophisticated hockey fans, and that many came for the fights. (Hard to believe, eh? ) Well, Dave Semenko, Dave Brown, Bob Probert et al would not do very well on big ice. Did you ever see that Ruffles add with Messier and the Pylons? Same idea. It was felt that Americans wouldn't appreciate the finesse elements that the larger ice would bring. I'm glad to hear you like it. I do too, and I really would like the NHL to go to the bigger ice surface. There has been some talk on the CBC telecasts of possibly getting rid of the red line but I would prefer the bigger ice.
