At Worlds, the United States got to overtime with help from a Brock Nelson power-play goal, which was just enough to sneak through to the quarterfinals. And that was all they did; Tomas Marcinko assisted on the tying goal, and Slovakia won on a goal by Marko Dano, who you may remember from Springfield. Didn’t matter by then: The Americans meet the Czech Republic, Thursday, 9:15 a.m. (NBCSN).
The Czechs’ first game of the tournament, a win over Russia, was the tiebreaker that gave them first place. Russia gets Germany, Canada (off an ugly loss to Finland) plays Sweden in a pretty marquee quarter, and Finland draws Denmark.
The locals stats box, through the round robin (Pokka, again, admittedly a little tongue-in-cheek; he was a Sound Tiger for two and a half hours or so):
| Team | GP | G-A-Pts | PIM | +/- | SOG | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nino Niederreiter | SUI | 7 | 3-3-6 | 2 | +6 | 30 |
| Brock Nelson | USA | 3 | 1-1-2 | 2 | -1 | 5 |
| Johan Sundstrom | SWE | 6 | 1-1-2 | 4 | -4 | 12 |
| Tomas Marcinko | SVK | 7 | 1-1-2 | 2 | -6 | 7 |
| Ville Pokka | FIN | 7 | 0-2-2 | 0 | +2 | 6 |
| Team | MP | Rec | GA | Svs | GAA | SP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ilya Sorokin | RUS | 75:40 | 1-0 | 0 | 36 | 0.00 | 1.000 |
| Mikko Koskinen | FIN | 300:00 | 5-0 | 6 | 84 | 1.20 | .933 |
More from the Worlds, and our favorite kind of more: Watch hockey players butcher Russian words and phrases. (They do better than I would. I can barely handle English most of the time.)
And RIP, Guy Clark.