MILAN — In Massillon, Ohio, a small town just outside of Canton, the home of football, newborn babies are presented with a miniature football.
In Finland, newborns might as well be handed a white board with the Wedge Plus One formation drawn up on it.
Finns are born penalty-killers, raised with a defense-first mindset and taught to play smart, safe, opportunistic, annoying-as-hell hockey from birth. It’s why they’re fighting against the big boys for medals in every tournament, from the juniors to the Olympics, despite barely having enough NHLers to fill up their roster. The smallest of the Big Four earns its spot alongside Canada, the United States and Sweden with blood, sweat and clears. Puck comes in, puck goes out. Rinse, repeat. Eventually, there’ll be a chance to make a play offensively, but the Finns never force it.
So it wasn’t in the least bit shocking that, after Erik Haula put the Finns up 2-0 on Canada early in the second period of Friday’s Olympic semifinal, Finland retreated into a defensive shell. It’s who they are and it’s what they do.
But just because it was expectable doesn’t mean it was acceptable. Finland tried to advance to the gold medal game with a 37-minute penalty kill, and made it 36 and a half. Shea Theodore’s equalizer at 9:26 of the third and Nathan MacKinnon’s power-play goal with 36 seconds left gave Canada a 3-2 win and sent the Canadians into the gold-medal game and the Finns into the bronze-medal game. On paper, it was a valiant effort. In reality, it was a blown opportunity, a self-inflicted failure that will haunt them for years.
The Finns had two shots on goal over the last 17 minutes of the second period and were outshot 39-17 in the game. They collapsed in the slot and just softly flipped the puck out of the defensive zone only to see Canada’s tsunami of scorers bring it right back in, over and over again. They barely tested Jordan Binnington, one of the shakiest goaltenders in the tournament. They got to 2-0 and decided that was good enough. They stopped playing hockey against possibly the greatest assemblage of forwards in the sport’s history.
There’s playing defensively and there’s playing scared, and Finland played scared. And in this game, on this stage, there’s no defending such a defensive mindset.
“It’s hard not to,” veteran forward Teuvo Teräväinen said. “They’re pushing, they’re coming (and) you don’t want to make mistakes and you (don’t) want to give them three-on-twos and that kind of stuff. So the game goes that way. It’s easy to say now you have to play a little bit more offense, make them play defense, but it’s not easy, for sure.”
Erik Haula, whose shorthanded goal off Joel Armia’s manhandling of Sam Reinhart staked Finland to that 2-0 lead, said that the chatter on the bench was “how we can’t just defend.” But that’s all they did. To their credit, they did it extraordinarily well. Playing Finland is like rough-housing with your obnoxious little brother. You’re bigger, you’re stronger, you’re faster, but he just wants it a little more, and will do anything he can to make it a real fight.
Finland got the lead by restricting Canada to one-and-dones, making quick clears and outworking a lackluster Canadian forecheck. They sorted every rush perfectly, using quick sticks to stymie the likes of Connor McDavid, Macklin Celebrini, Tom Wilson and MacKinnon. They boxed out Canada’s big forwards to give goaltender Juuse Saros clean lanes to see every shot. When their sticks weren’t quick enough, they used their bodies to clear rebounds. After Saros made a tough save on a Mitch Marner shot late in the tied game, Miro Heiskanen basically dragged Nick Suzuki to the ice in order to prevent him from getting to the juicy rebound.
Whatever it takes.
“We have a great team,” Armia said. “Five-on-five, they got one goal (and) that was goalie interference.”
It might have been. Theodore’s shot from the point that beat Saros was preceded by Brad Marchand falling on top of the goaltender. He was battling for position with Haula in the crease, but there’s no denying Saros didn’t have an adequate chance to reset himself after the collision. Finnish coach Antti Pennanen chose not to challenge the play. It’s easy to say now, in hindsight, that he should have, but goaltender interference is always a squirrelly call, and a failed challenge would have given Canada a power play immediately after tying the game, with just half a period left. It would have been the highest-risk, highest-reward challenge imaginable.
The Finnish press has had Pennanen squarely on the hot seat since the Finns’ miserable performance at last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off. The decision not to challenge the Theodore goal won’t help his case. But the non-challenge wasn’t Pennanen’s mistake. His team’s inability — or worse, unwillingness — to create any offense until 2-0 became 2-2 was.
Finland took a 2-0 lead with well-timed aggression. They lost it with constant conservatism.
“It’s a long time just to defend against a team like that,” Kaapo Kakko said. “That’s what we talked (about), we need some offense, also. We tried to get pucks in the O-zone and tried to create something over there. That’s what we tried in the end a little bit. But that’s how it goes. We got the lead and they are coming hard. First thing is defense at that point. But yeah, thinking about it now, maybe try to get a little more plays with the puck.”
Mikko Rantanen, the burly Dallas superstar, credited Canada for forcing Finland into what he called “the half-ice game.” Even though Canada struggled to cycle and sustain shifts in the offensive zone until late, when they started firing away more from the point to create more action in the front of the net, it’s just so difficult to keep up with guys who move as quick and as efficiently as McDavid and MacKinnon and Celebrini. It was all the Finns could do to flip the puck out and go for a change.
“We tried,” Rantanen said. “But when you defend 25-30 seconds in your D-zone, there’s not one guy in the world who can go (on) offense after that. We were dumping it in a lot and changing, and they were just coming at us.”
Most of the time, the puck didn’t even get the puck past the neutral zone. Eventually, when Canada really cranked up the pressure in the third, the Finns resorted to icing the puck just to catch their breath.
“They have so many good skaters, it’s tough,” Armia added. “Once you kind of start the cycle where you start dumping the puck to the neutral zone, they regroup always and gather speed. We could have been maybe more aggressive on the controlled forecheck and picked up more speed.”
Finland now has about 24 hours to get over a loss that will stick with them forever. A bronze medal in an NHL Olympics is no small feat, even for a team that won gold in Beijing, bronze in Sochi, bronze in Vancouver, silver in Torino and bronze in Nagano.
“We’ll be ready for that one,” captain Mikael Granlund said.
They always are. Ready to defend. Ready to scrap. Ready to be annoying as hell. Ready to be the team that, as Eeli Tolvanen put it before the Olympics, “Nobody wants to play against.”
But you can’t defend your way to a gold medal. The Finns pride themselves on being 200-foot players, on being well-rounded athletes as comfortable on the kill as they are on the power play. But Friday’s failure — and it was a failure, no matter how good Canada may be — is a hard reminder such players are called two-way players for a reason.