Team USA’s Speedy Children Delivered A Beatdown Of Canada

If every instinct the U.S. women's hockey team had at the 2022 Olympics was wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. On Tuesday, in their round-robin meeting at the Olympics, the Americans celebrated a 5-0 win over Canada, the sort of thorough beatdown atypical of their meetings in international play. The rivalry is usually characterized by nervy overtime periods and tense shootouts, so no surprise that this was the largest margin of victory in any U.S.-Canada game at the Olympics. It was also the first time the Canadian women had been shut out in an Olympic game.

Chalk some of it up to the absence of team captain Marie-Philip Poulin—she’s out with a lower-body injury and poised to return later in the tournament—but a more honest accounting of this game would say the result has been long in the making. After being swept in their exhibition Rivalry Series and dropping both meetings at last year’s world championships in Czechia, Canada has now lost seventh consecutive games to Team USA. (And Poulin did play in the other ones.) Yesterday only reaffirmed what was clear in the six games prior: This American team and its young superstars are too fast and too skilled for the veteran-heavy Team Canada to handle.