You know, looking back at it, Bylsma's strategy for the Olympics was pretty similar to the way the Pens play: Big Offense, Defensive is secondary, and the edge in the shoot-outs with a couple gimmicky players. He chose mostly young, unproven D-men and potent young forwards. This worked great against the lesser competition but laying two goose eggs against the best teams is simply unacceptable. I can buy a giant deflation in losing 1-0 to the Canadians, but damn, that's where good coaching comes in and get those mutha fuckas ready play the Bronze game.
Anyway, It appears Bylsma's style worked just as well in the Olympics as it does for the Penguins in the NHL playoffs.
Its a well known axiom in most sports that defense wins championships, I should have paid more attention to that myself earlier on and been more suspicious of the high scoring output from the US team. When you meet a team that consistently clears creases and lets play flow from its defense, laying down the law like Canada's did, and then Finland's did, all that high octane nonsense suddenly evaporates.
We only won in 1980 because Herb Brooks understood the game. Since then we've had some decent organizational structure (particularly in 2010), but over all the lessons don't seem to stick.
"When do you ask yourself,
'Maybe everyone else isn't wrong for using the definitions of words; maybe I'm wrong for making up new definitions of words and then using them as crude slurs' -TiG
- By wat0n