The Winter Olympics are into the second week and the men's hockey competition is starting up on Wednesday and comes after the USA and Canada played on the women's side and live online are the Czech Republic against Sweden and Latvia playing Switzerland for the preliminary round games and comes ahead of the United States and Russia starting their games in Sochi and it will be live on the USA Network and MSNBC at 12 pm noon ET.
The Czech Republic and Sweden along with Latvia and Switzerland are starting off the busy men's hockey schedule and the gold medal game in that competition will be one of the most watched and buzzed about events in Russia. The home team has the United States in their group and it's likely that the US and the Russian team will advance out of Group A with Slovenia and Slovakia as the other teams. The US and Russia will play in the second game on Saturday, while the US Opens with Slovakia and finishes with Slovenia, while Canada is playing Norway, Austria and Finland and all those games will be on the USA Network.
The NBC family of channels is broadcasting nearly every event and they all will be streaming online and the United States has all their preliminary matches in the morning, as they play Thursday at 7:30 am ET and that same start time goes for their matchups on Saturday and Sunday as well. Canada has all their games on the USA Network and all will be starting at 12 pm noon. The prelims lead into the next round and then the playoffs start and that will have four teams getting a bye and all 12 teams will advance to the next round, but the rankings will depend on who plays and who gets to go through to the quarters.
The next set has the teams playing starting on Wednesday, February 19 and all those games will go down on that date and the four winners of those matchups in the quarters will advance to the semis. Those games will be on the Friday after the quarters and then leads into the bronze and gold medal games, which will be on Saturday and then on Sunday, with the NBC Sports Network and primary NBC channel handling the coverage.
Team USA and Team Canada are looking the strongest and heading into play this week, Jonathan Quick will be the starter for the first game for the US, while Carey Price will open in goal for team Canada. Ryan Miller is going to be the first backup over Jimmy Howard and on the Canadian side, former Olympics hero Roberto Luongo will be in net the second game for the team. Price is in the Olympics for the first time and Miller was the US goalie last time around. On the women's side, the US and Canada already played and they are both through to the next round and the Canadian team took this matchup before heading towards the medal round next week.
Check here for the men's hockey live streaming coverage from the Olympics website.