Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

I've always liked Finland

No, really. Ask anybody who knows me, I'm not just jumping on a bandwagon this time. I've been a Finland fan since Timo Blomqvist was my favorite player.

I was pretty much rooting for Russia, but I'm not sorry to see Finland advance instead. I was surprised, when I got home in the opening seconds of the third period, to see Russia down 2-0, and they didn't really test Niittymaki in the third either. That's quite a defense Finland put together there.

(Speaking of Niittymaki, I saw him earlier this season when we played Philadelphia, and my comment to my mom was "I hope they don't let this kid buy a Porsche."*)

John Davidson mentioned during the game that Finland was doing the best job of playing as a team. I'm curious to know how they came together so quickly, since it is also a team of NHLers (from what I gathered over the last two weeks, the Swiss team is the only one that really spent a significant amound of time playing together before getting to Turin). It led back to my not-sure-if-I-believe it theory from yesterday, and just a bit later in the broadcast J.D. quoted Ken Hitchcock as saying something similar. Here are the quotes as I found them on canada.com:

There's a big difference between playing in a World Cup and playing in the Olympics. We're not just playing against a lot of NHL players. We're playing against a lot of flags.

It's different playing a Finn in the NHL than playing a Finn over here who has the flag on his jersey. You see players over here who play out of character, you see players who are skilled but make the distinction to be workers over a short period of time...

Maybe I was onto something after all.

*I didn't mean that to be a tasteless remark. I admired Pelle Lindbergh, and I was saying that I thought Niittymaki has the potential to be in that class.

Posted by Nic at February 24, 2006 06:00 PM | TrackBack