Chris Pronger knows all about Canada peaking late in tournaments – and thinks they’ll do it vs. USA

Credit: Chris Pronger Team Canada

The mood in Canada, around Canadian hockey, in discussions and debates and stories about Team Canada, felt oh-so familiar Saturday night after it lost an unforgettable game to Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off.

Few if anyone would understand that more than Chris Pronger.

The Hall of Fame defenseman, 50, represented Canada in four Olympics, a World Junior Championship and a World Championship during his legendary career. And the scene Saturday at Montreal’s Bell Centre immediately brought a rush of memories.

Pronger, if you recall, played on Canada’s Olympic gold medal squads at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games and 2010 Vancouver Games. In both instances, Canada lost a key game in the round-robin stage, creating a national panic. They took a 5-2 beating to Sweden to open 2002, and they lost 5-3 to the Americans to close out the 2010 round-robin. Social media didn’t exist as we know it in 2002 and was still in its early phase in 2010 but, even then, Pronger remembers the pressure and media coverage being frenzied.

“You can sense the weight of the country on your shoulders, you can sense what it meant to the country…the buzz, the doubters, the questionings, the broken ankles from people jumping off the bandwagon,” he told Daily Faceoff this week. “You still got a pretty good sense of all that back then.”

As Pronger added, Canada always carries the burden of being the presumptive favorite in every tournament it plays. That was true during the peak of his career and it’s mostly true now. But the parity of the sport has improved so much that even the world’s best teams can’t always blow their opponents away, he explained. It made Canada’s road through the 4 Nations round-robin that much tougher. The Canadians required overtime to beat Sweden and weathered a furious comeback from Finland. Consider that Canada beat Sweden, who beat the U.S., who beat Canada, who beat Finland, who beat Sweden. It was anyone’s tournament.

Saturday’s tilt between Canada and the U.S. was close, with Canada showing well in a lot of the advanced metrics, but the Americans looked bigger, stronger, faster, meaner and superior in goal and in net. They celebrated the hard-earned victory, in a hostile environment on Canadian soil, as a watershed moment for the sport’s greatest rivalry, a chance to send a message that it was “their time.”

But nothing about what Pronger saw rattled him. He’s been here before. He remembers Canada being written off by many in 2002 and 2010 only to rally and win in the Final when it counted most, forging iconic national memories, from “JooOeee Sakic” to Sidney Crosby’s golden goal. A big hurdle Canada had to overcome then is the same one it has faced over the past week: achieving chemistry. As Pronger points out, the other teams’ national programs allow their athletes to play much more often together growing up. It’s been that way a long time for the European nations, and USA Hockey’s rise to power has coincided with its own decision to centralize via the National Team Development Program beginning in 1996. Whereas for pretty much every incarnation of Team Canada, the melding of players and personalities has to happen on the fly.

“I don’t think people understand that you’re thinking, ‘Oh, it’s Connor McDavid and anybody can play with him,’ ” Pronger said. “Well, that’s not the case. Sidney Crosby. That’s not the case. There’s a certain type of player that those guys like playing with and they get used to playing with, whether it’s McDavid with Zach Hyman or it’s Crosby with Chris Kunitz. They find that chemistry and they find that balance. And you grab Nathan MacKinnon, let’s say: ‘Oh, he can keep up with McDavid, so they’re going to gel, they’re going to mesh together.’ And that’s not always the case.”

In Pronger’s experience, it took time to figure out the right line combinations and defense pairings, and that’s what he’s seen at the 4 Nations: Canada tinkering, trying to find that right chemistry. It finally happened Monday when Canada took on Finland. That included icing a top six of Brayden Point, McDavid and Mark Stone and Crosby, MacKinnon and Sam Reinhart. They produced every goal in the 5-3 win.

“Much like 2010, it took a little bit of time, but the beauty of those tournaments is that as the tournament progressed, you saw, and you could feel in the locker room and on the ice, that guys were starting to come together, guys were getting it, guys were gelling, and with each successive game you got better and better and better,” Pronger said.

He described the goal of the best-on-best tournaments he played in as peaking “to play your best game in the championship game” and believes Canada is building toward that. Related: never one to mince words, he wonders if Team USA overdid it with over-the-top physical play in the win last weekend. Could they end up being the classic “high school bully who peaked too early” trope?

“I hate to say it, but in my opinion, the U.S. may have jumped the gun with how hard they went on Saturday, and they almost used that as the championship game,” Pronger said. “I try to explain to people, playing that hard is incredibly difficult, and when you look at the playoffs in the NHL, I don’t even know if they go that hard. To keep that pace, the back and forth, the speed of that game, for an entire playoffs would be unheard of, just purely on the pace of the game.

“But you’re looking at the injuries that come from that when you play that hard. And that’s the check and the balance, and that’s the drawback, if you will, for having a tournament in the middle of the year when guys are already banged up. When they’re playing with their country’s pride on the line, they’re going to leave it all out there.

The Americans have paid the price for the victory indeed. Blueliner Charlie McAvoy played a rugged game and gutted through an upper-body injury that turned into an infection and cost him the rest of the tournament. The bash brothers, Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, are expected to play through injuries suffered in the Canada and Sweden games, respectively. And Auston Matthews continues to fight through an ailment as he has for much of the season with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

So Pronger feels a momentum shift heading into Thursday. Put on the spot to make a prediction, he doesn’t hesitate.

“I think Canada pulls it out 3-2,” he said. “I think it’s going to be another close game. But when you’ve already played somebody, you now have a book, and an understanding of how they defend the holes, where to leave pucks, where to put dump ins, on and on and on. It just gives them a little better understanding of what they need to do on Thursday.”

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Chris Pronger knows all about Canada peaking late in tournaments – and thinks they’ll do it vs. USA

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