A Loss to the US might not be a bad thing

Forget the hand wringing and take a cup of hot chocolate from Seinfeld.

That's not necessarily a bad thing if Team Canada loses tomorrow to the Americans.

The more hockey the better, so far as this unfocused, uncertain, still unassembled team is concerned - and a loss tomorrow will mean four games, rather than three, to reach the gold medal.

All of them, of course, will have to be won, but that's the way it gets in Olympic hockey after the preliminary round, and that's what makes Olympic hockey so compelling to watch.

It is hard to know what to make of the Team Canada decision not to practice yesterday. Harry Neale once said he understood perfectly well that his players didn't like practice, but that was okay because "I don't like their games." While there is much to like in the two games we have seen so far - the drive of Sidney Crosby, the pressure goaltending of Martin Brodeur, the defensive play of Shea Weber, the daring of Drew Doughty and the nose for the net that is Dany Heatley's great gift - there is much not to like as well.

Back in the Turin disaster of 2006, when Canada came in seventh, coach Pat Quinn conceded his team never did come together in the short stretch of the Olympic tournament, never did form the necessary "identity" that a winner requires.

So far, the same can be said here.

If there is any chemistry with this team, it's what came prepackaged. The power play has, so far, been handed mainly to the San Jose Sharks line of Heatley, Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau, with Dan Boyle back on the point. They have familiarity with each other, which others on the team do not.

That said, it took four power plays for Canada to connect the other night (Marleau's goal) and one goal in six attempts is not much to brag about.

The power play Canada will need must feature its best player, Crosby, and the Swiss game was simply disastrous for whatever combinations were sent out with Crosby. Whether Jarome Iginla, the goal scorer for Canada against Norway, was hurt, as has been rumoured, or simply bad, Iginla was soon replaced with Patrice Bergeron, who was awful.

That, essentially, has left Crosby stranded. It is by no accident that he shone on the shootout - no wingers to worry about.

There are undoubtedly second-guessers to be found in every bar in the country who will say Team Canada erred in selecting, say, Bergeron over Jeff Carter, the exceptional Philadelphia Flyer scorer, or Martin St. Louis, the comeback star with the Tampa Bay Lightning.

But Bergeron is not alone in struggling: the same applies to Brenden Morrow, Mike Richards, Corey Perry, pick a number.

Boyle has hardly shone on the attack - surely leading to questions about the advisability of leaving Washington's Mike Green, the NHL's highest-scoring defenceman, off the team.

But second-guessing is about as useful in international hockey as complaining about the refereeing, This is the entry. It isn't bad. It just isn't a team yet and is a work-in-progress. The early decision to go with familiar defence pairing in the case of Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, both of the Chicago Blackhawks, seems already lost. Keith is fantastic; Seabrook seems slow. As, at times, does Chris Pronger, who sometimes gets delayed by his own temper.

Speed pays more of a dividend in highly skilled international play than it does in the NHL, and Norway's coach Roy Johansen, the only coach who has seen both Canada and the U.S., says while the Canadians were more physical, the Americans "appear to be faster." Canada will be in tough and obviously found the Swiss tough, which again isn't a bad thing. As coach Mike Babcock says, adversity counts almost as much as goals: "In order to win at this level of competition, you have to get better every day." Which still leaves them a day to play with, to get better.

And if Team Canada remains a team in search of its identity come tomorrow, having that extra game to play, and win, might in the end serve a purspose.