TURIN -- It was the Italian Stallion, or at least the Italian, Phil Esposito, who was once asked how he was able to score so many goals over the course of his National Hockey League career.
"Scoring is easy," the former Boston Bruins star answered. "You stand in the slot. Take your beating. Shoot the puck in the net."
The men of Canada's Olympic hockey team may want to give Esposito's strategy a shot. After all, they've got nothing to lose -- except another game.
Scoring, or the lack of it, remained the central theme in media scrums with Team Canada players and coaches yesterday. And, yes, even with the team's fabled executive director, Wayne Gretzky, who once knew a thing or two about scoring.
It was Gretzky who had said on landing in Turin that the 2006 version of the Olympic men's hockey team probably had more offensive depth than the '02 squad, which won gold. And yet this year's model has gone two games without putting a puck in the net -- other than during warm-ups.
"I'm shocked," Gretzky said of the lack of scoring before quickly downgrading his shock to disappointment. "We've got to figure out a way to get some goals."
And they have exactly two games to do it.
Gretzky thinks his players look tight. He's right. The team's many young players are probably feeling greater pressure than the more experienced squad in 2002, which had the likes of Mario Lemieux and Steve Yzerman to calm players down.
Anyone who knows anything about sports will tell you that when you play tight, you don't skate as fast and you don't score as often. And when you don't score as often, you start getting tentative and you don't move the puck to teammates as freely and easily as you would normally. You begin to play, well, like Team Canada's playing right now.
Now, you could argue, and many Canadian players were yesterday, that the team's two-game goal drought looks worse than it is. In the 2-0 loss to the Swiss last Saturday, Canada outshot its opponents 49-18. More telling, Canadian coaches had their team with 38 bona-fide scoring chances against eight for the Swiss.
In other words, they got beaten by a hot goaltender.
There was no such excuse against Finland.
"We just got outplayed by them," captain Joe Sakic told reporters. "That's all there is to it."
And when you get outplayed, you don't score goals, regardless how good the other goalie is.
There were other points of view being offered around the rink, and one I particularly liked was Bob Nicholson's. The president of Hockey Canada said that watching the men's team was like watching one of the old Soviet teams from the 1960s and '70s.
"We're all pass, no shoot," he said.
That was certainly the case against the Finns, especially on the power play.
Ken Hitchcock, an assistant coach with Team Canada, thinks a big part of the problem the past two games was the lack of determination his team showed. In particular, he said, Canada was unable to match, or better, the tenacity of its opponents.
"There's a whole different level of intensity when you put that jersey on with your flag on it," Hitchcock said.
It's also clear the Canadians have not adapted particularly well to the larger Olympic ice surface, especially in the offensive zone. Players are playing on the perimeter and not getting to the net, creating chaos, being there for that shot that bounces in off their butt. A Phil Esposito goal.
"There is no room in the offensive zone, depth-wise," Hitchcock said. "All the room is width. So I think you'll see us play a more north-south against the Czechs."
Hey, Canadians don't care which direction their team plays as long as it takes them all to the same place: the gold-medal game.
Maybe Gretzky is right. Maybe his players just need to have more fun here, the way the Finns did on Sunday.
"This should be the greatest week of their lives," Gretzky said. "They need to loosen up and play this game like they're enjoying themselves."
Which pretty much describes the way Gretzky himself played. Come to think of it, scoring was never much of a problem for him, either.
2