Take Nation: This is working for me

The first thing to say about the Four Nations Faceoff is that any concerns about whether guys would try all that hard were allayed pretty early in the opener.

Those guys tried their asses off from the word "go" and didn't really miss a shift. It's certainly preferable to the All-Star Game, even if criticism of that is overblown, too.

The way the players were talking about it, you got the feeling they weren't gonna be half-assing it, but they also talk about how good the ice is at every Winter Classic and how they're putting in 100 percent effort for non-conference games on a Thursday in January so they're not always the most reliable conveyors of their own intentions. The tournament still feels kinda fake and the NHL and NHLPA didn't dispel that feeling by announcing an eight-team World Cup before they dropped the puck on Four Nations. "This is nice," they seemed to say, "but it's a store-brand version of what we've done in the past and will do in the future." Not ideal.

But hey, if the quality of the hockey is gonna be this high, no one should complain too much. Unless their country loses, in which case this was the fakest tournament ever.

Let's go:

Winning is good. But…

One of the fun and often not-so-fun-at-a-certain-point aspects of watching the Premier League or the FA Cup is that a lot of times you'll be watching a game and like Ipswich Town or Swansea is hanging in there against, say, Liverpool's first team and you're going, "What on earth?" for the first 75 minutes of a 1-1 match.

But then in the last 10, 15 minutes all those chances that Liverpool was missing have completely started going in the opposite direction and it's just an avalanche of goals. A month later and all anyone who thinks back about that game remembers is that the final score was like 4-1 and the how-they-got-there of it doesn't really matter.

Obviously I'm drawing the parallel to how the USA/Finland game last night ended up going. Connor Hellebuyck gave up a deflection goal early but Finland made the US bleed its own blood and they were, eventually, not going to accept it. The big dogs on the American roster started running downhill and there was no stopping them. 

(You could really feel the absence of an MVP candidate like Quinn Hughes early on. He's by far the best player missing from this tournament.)

Absolutely have to be happy being the only team with three points through the first two games of the tournament.

But you gotta say this: If they start slow against Canada on Saturday it's not gonna be Henri Jokiharju breaking in on a 3-on-2, ya know what I mean?

You can afford to come out complacent or without the needed urgency when the other team really only has two lines and a D pair that can go punch for punch with your middle six. Hellebuyck will be looking behind him a lot more often if the Yanks don't bring it tomorrow night in what will feel absolutely like the ultimate road game, an environment few players in either team has played in.

Obviously Mike Sullivan was trying to spread the wealth early, and that was part of the problem in the first 25 minutes or so of the game. But once he settled on Jack Eichel with Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, it was game over. That's a mistake that won't be made again. But roster goof-ups, line-matching errors, on-ice blunders — really, any mistakes at all — just can't be made against the Canadians if the US wants to head to home soil in the top 2 of the standings.

Speaking of the standings

Gotta hand it to the schedule makers.

It was a little en vogue to predict Canada and Sweden would go to OT — hell, I did it. too. And so when they did need extra time to decide it, that made things a lot more interesting for the rest of the tournament.

If we're accepting that even in a rivalry game, the Finns just won't be able to keep up with Sweden, the most likely outcome is that they're heading to Boston with four points. Canada, on home ice, is the favorite in that big rivalry game; they could have put eight or nine past Juuse Saros.

But everyone in that US/Canada game will know what's at stake because of the early result. The pressure was always going to be enormous in that 8 p.m. game, but man. We're talking about Appointment Television now.

And no matter what happens tomorrow, Monday's USA/Sweden game is gonna be so sick.

The old man's still got it

Not really a surprise, but Sidney Crosby sure looked really really really good in the OT win over Sweden.

I feel like I didn't get the memo that there was some question about Crosby playing in the Olympics next season but I saw a couple media people mention his participation as if it weren't a foregone conclusion. People were bewildered but I've figured out what the issue there was: Crosby has been on a middling-to-bad team for the last three years and has little to no help. So when things go wrong, much like Connor Bedard in Chicago, everyone's just noticing that things are going wrong and Crosby is nearby. Proximity to a disaster doesn't really mean it's your fault but if you're The Leader people will make that connection.

Crosby is, of course, The Leader of the Canadian team until he retires — the stat is that he's won his last 26 games in international competition — and if you weren't sure that was the case, or were concerned he lost a step, that pass to Nathan MacKinnon on the power play was pretty emphatic.

Seeing Crosby does make one kinda sad, though. Unless something in his thinking changes dramatically, he's gonna play out the string in Pittsburgh on teams for which wins and losses just aren't going to matter that much. I hate when people say stuff like "hockey is better when the Rangers are competitive" or whatever, but hockey is definitely better when the best players are being tested against one another on the biggest stages against. Big reason, I think, last year's Cup Final was so cool.

But hey, the Olympics are only a year away so we won't have to wait that long to see Crosby do this all over again.

Is the Four Nations bad, actually?

Brutal to see Shea Theodore get hurt — and now be confirmed as "week to week" — so early in Game 1. You feel for the guy and if you're not deranged, you gotta feel for his team, too. Not that Vegas is going to feel too badly about learning his injury will hold him out of, say, their next 26 games which by a crazy coincidence is exactly how many they have left in the regular season, but Theodore is a key cog for them and that Pacific Division race was really shaping up to be fun in the next few months.

I can tell you for sure there will be grumbling about this injury, and how playing games like this hurts the injured players' employers. I know that deep in my heart because John Tavares got injured in the Olympics more than a decade ago and people were still bringing it up in the last couple weeks. "No one wants that!" Yeah man, no kidding. But if you wanted guys to try hard in this tournament — you did, because you needed that for the hockey to be good — then you have to accept that one or two players are gonna get injured, potentially for a long time, in the course of trying hard. Or more to the point, you have to not-complain about it. And Canada's team is already "seeking clarification" on injury replacements, basically saying, "Hey we get to bring in more guys now, right?" We all knew what the deal was, but also the NHL was never gonna allow any team to get down to eleven forwards or five defensemen, let alone Canada.

Seems like Thomas Harley is gonna be hanging around Boston the next little while, just in case. I guess we'll see.

Who will look after the goals?

Jordan Binnington gave up three goals in Canada's tournament-opening OT win and depending on who you ask, people might say he "should have had" anywhere between one and three of them.

Thus begins, in earnest, Canada's goaltending controversy. You could make a very good argument that none of the three guys they brought are the three best Canadian goalies right now, but they're stuck with who they have unless injuries befall at least two of them (don't get any ideas!). I gotta say I don't think Binnington looked bad and he certainly made enough game-saving stops down the stretch and in OT than the one definite stinker he allowed. I dunno if I'd start him again against the U.S. tomorrow, but it's a short tournament and frankly I don't know that you could feel super confident going to Adin Hill or Sam Montembeault instead, y'know? 

That said, maybe you gotta ask questions about the defensemen Canada brought to this tournament, because they were under siege in that third period and parts of overtime. Maybe Evan Bouchard might not have helped with that, but also, I feel like he's better than Drew Doughty or Colton Parayko here in 2025, but I guess what do I know?

I wouldn't have thought, necessarily, that Canada would feel like a team that needed to win 4-3, but here we are.