The Sochi Olympics hockey schedule in 2014 for the men's side picks up on Wednesday, February 12 with the start coming at 12 pm ET and the NBC coverage will be streaming for the Russia Winter games matchups in the preliminary round with Latvia taking on Switzerland and the Czech Republic playing against Sweden from Group C.
The men's hockey side of things is one of the most anticipated events of the games and teams like the United States, Canada and Russia will be looking to take gold. The NHL took a nice break to get the Olympics in and now players like Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and Ryan Callahan will be looking to get medals for their nation and after Vancouver, the Canadian national team will have a bulls eye on their backs. The United States made it into the gold medal game last time around in 2010 and Canada won that and now those two teams are looked at as the favorites to eventually make it to the medal game.
The first match for the United States will be the day after the tournament starts and they open up with a match against Slovakia and that comes from Group A. The USA team then plays against Russia and that should be one of the most anticipated matches of the tournament before the team finishes their group play with Slovenia. The matches for the United State will all be on the NBC Sports Network and after the first round of matches, 12 teams will advance to the next round.
The playoff round starts up on February 18 and that will have the teams that advanced form the preliminaries and that will shake out who gets to play in the medal games. The breakdown for the next round has four teams in the top position getting a bye and that leads into the quarters and the ranks will be by points and number of goals along with goal differential and that leads into four games for the quarters and four teams will advance from that to the semis.
The quarters start up on Wednesday, February 19 and then the semis will be on Friday and that will have both games and they will be on the NBCSN. The medal round games come that weekend and on Saturday the 22nd, the bronze medal game goes down, while the gold medal game will be on Sunday, February 23.