The Winter Olympics hockey tournament continues on Friday and Czech Republic and Latvia will play in their preliminary round group match streaming online from NBC in Sochi and comes after the first set of games on Thursday and other teams in action heading into the weekend includes Team USA, Canada, Russia and Sweden.
The schedule has three more games after the early one on Friday, as Group C has Sweden and Switzerland playing, while all the teams in Group B are in action, with Canada playing Austria and Norway playing against Finland. The schedule continues through the weekend and is very busy with four games on Saturday and Sunday, with the United States playing Russia in one of the most anticipated games of the early goings. The United States and Canada come in as the favorites in the tournament once again after making it to the gold medal game in Vancouver last time in the 2010 games.
That gold medal matchup was one of the best finals ever and now the two sides will get the chance to meet again later in the playoffs round. All 12 teams will advance and the top four nations will be in line for a bye and the quarters should be very interesting. The United States started off their gold medal quest with a big offensive start against Slovakia, putting seven goals on Jaroslav Halak and Jonathan Quick had a great start after taking over as the number one goalie for Ryan Miller, who was excellent back in Vancouver. The team got goals from Paul Stastny, Ryan Kesler, Phil Kessel and Dustin Brown and the team now has momentum heading into their next game against Russia before playing Slovenia to finish the preliminary round.
Captain Zach Parise said that the team played hard and took advantage of their opportunities and that they are still looking at that gold medal loss against Canada from years ago as motivation. Canada started off a little slower than the United States, winning 3-1 against Norway and that game had Carey Price in net to start, while Roberto Luongo served as the backup and will start their next game.
