Team Canada has incentive to beat France 10-0 in last Olympic preliminary game

The Olympics are using a complicated tournament seeding system, where the top team will be decided by standings or total goal differential. With Canada and the USA down to the wire, the score in tomorrow’s games will have huge importance to determine the 1st and 2nd seeds.

For Canada to secure the most favourable path through the bracket rounds of the tournament, they’ll need to run up the score against France tomorrow. Analysts are saying they may need to put the pedal down, and try to win by as many goals as possible.

Currently, Canada has a goal differential of +9 to this point in the tournament. Team USA has a +7. Canada will have a lower-ranked opponent in France, but USA does too in their final prelim game against Germany.

It’s worth noting that Canada has a higher goal differential than the USA already despite playing much tougher opponents. Czechia and Switzerland were quality teams with a number of NHLers on their roster, while USA got easier opponents with Denmark and Latvia.

The first seed will get to play the winner of the 8th and 9th ranked teams during the opening of the bracket rounds, while the second seed plays the winner of the 7th and 10th ranked teams. There will be no re-seeding until the semifinal round.

The teams that will likely be eliminated from the preliminary round are easy to identify: Italy and France. Outside of that, the final seeds even for lower-ranked teams will be decided by goal differential in the final few games left in the preliminaries.

What’s already becoming clear though is that Canada and USA are on track to meet for the first time in the Gold Medal match.

We’ll be watching the scoreboard carefully in all games tomorrow at the Olympics. Team Canada needs to take care of the task ahead of them, and absolutely run up the score on Team France tomorrow.

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