Hockey slots behind football, baseball and basketball as fan favorites in American team sports, but with a fiercely contested Olympic game on the ice Saturday, hopefully we all can appreciate it a bit more.
Four years after being underdogs and dropping a heart-breaker to Team Canada in a gold-medal match, the American men’s team arrived in Sochi loaded and favored to compete. They proved it Saturday. T.J. Oshie of the National Hockey League’s St. Louis Blues was the heralded competitor in a 3-2 overtime victory over host nation Russia, and it bears describing just how incredible this young man’s performance was.
Oshie was tapped to shoot over, and over, and over in the game’s deciding shootout, after the two sides battled to a 2-2 stalemate through three periods and one 5-minute, sudden-death overtime session of play. The shootout format is simple: one shooter matches up against the other team’s goaltender three times, and whichever side scores more wins. If both teams wind up tied after the three exchanges, it goes to sudden death — score and match, or fail and match, it goes on; fail to score and the other team does, it’s over. The United States and the Russians exchanged shots a ridiculous eight times.
Oshie took six of the Americans’ shots.
You hear hockey commentators say that converting above 50 percent of shootout attempts is superb; T.J. hit 4 of 6, 67 percent, small sample size be damned, against a goaltender, Sergei Bobrovsky, who hasn’t even hit his prime and was awarded the trophy for best at his position in the NHL last year. On the two Oshie missed, he flat-out beat Bobrovsky. Once to the forehand side, once to the back, and he had an open net both times. (A little more difficult on the latter, courtesy of proximity and a world-class stick save.) This also occurred at the Olympic games. Not just on the road, but across an ocean, in a nation where hockey is as inherent as vodka, and a nation where the quality of hockey is decidedly *better* than vodka. These guys are good. And their fans were hostile, because antecedents in mind, the United States beat the Soviet Union in the biggest upset in the history of the Winter Olympics 34 years ago, and the countries were fighting proxy wars against each other 10 minutes ago in the scale of world chronology.
T.J. Oshie: not just The Dude. America’s dude.
Additional credit goes to the U.S. goaltender, Jonathan Quick, who lived up to his last name with some sharp saves during the dramatic stretch.
Do yourself a favor and watch some of the replay over at NBCOlympics.com.
