Sweden’s road to gold starts in earnest Wednesday night against the United States, a gold-medal-level matchup that’s happening in the quarterfinals thanks to Slovakia’s surprising Group B victory. After three round-robin games and Tuesday’s perfunctory 5-1 rout of Latvia, the real do-or-die games start now. And while Canada and the United States — the other two gold-medal favorites — cruised into the quarters with three easy wins and a bye, Team Sweden has scuffled and shuffled its way here.
And they might be better off for it.
“You can cruise through it and then all of a sudden you’re tested in a way you weren’t prepared for,” Sweden coach Sam Hallam said. “It gives you a better feeling now that we’ve had these small things go wrong every game and had to look at things, adjust small things.”
It’s something Landeskog is getting a taste of with the Colorado Avalanche this season. After one of the best starts in NHL history — 31-2-7 — the Avs have lost nine of their last 15 games. Hardly a crisis, but potentially beneficial in the long run.
“That’s the same as over there, same as in the NHL,” Landeskog said. “You’re going to run into adversity at some point, and how you manage that is how you’re going to define yourself as a group, and how you handle that is up to us in the locker room. We’ve stumbled in the tournament so far. We’ve also shown some really good things, so for us, it’s just a matter of continuing to build, understanding that hopefully we’ve got another week to go here and understanding that we need to be playing our best hockey at the most important time, which is right now.”
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