3 Sports You Missed, Vol. 14

Team USA ends a 92-year hockey drought, TWO goalies win MVP in losing efforts, and the greatest college golf team ever loses the big one.

Before we get to the Sports You Missed: holy crap, I've been writing this newsletter for a year!

That’s right, a little over 365 days ago, I published the first thing I sent out on here: an essay about my Knicks simultaneously running out of gas, food, and water in a devastating playoff loss to the Pacers.

Obviously, a lot has changed in the past year. I’ve published 112 entries—slightly more than two per week, although heavily grouped around the Olympics and March Madness—and gotten a handful of outlets to produce credentials that said “Read Rodge” on them.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to the thousands of you who have subscribed in the first year—and a double-thanks to the hundreds of you that, for no good reason, have agreed to pay me money, despite the lack of paid subscriber perks.

A year ago I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my career, but you’ve given me the confidence (and financial wiggle room!) to find my footing. I’m really excited about what’s coming next, I’ll always be grateful to you for giving me this time while I was figuring things out.

Now: THE SPORTS YOU MISSED.

FLYYY HIIIIIGH FREEEEE BIRD (AGAIN!)

The American men’s national team won the hockey world championships, which on its face, doesn’t seem that ridiculous. We’re a big country that wins in a lot of sports. Hockey is somewhere between the fourth and sixth most popular sport here, and Team USA regularly wins gold medals in, like, the 14th-most popular sport in America. Surely, we’d win a hockey title now and then.

But when Tage Thompson scored an overtime game-winner against Switzerland in the gold medal match of the IIHF World Championships—in classic Swiss fashion, the score was a completely neutral 0-0 after regulation—it was Team USA’s first hockey world championship SINCE 1933.

(The DJ at this arena was much slower to the Free Bird trigger than the DJ at the women’s World championship.

You’ve gotta feel for Switzerland, which has NEVER won a World Championship, but won five silver medals, including last year. The MVP of the World Championship was actually Swiss legend Leonardo Genoni, the 37-year old Swiss goalie who had a .99 goals against average and saved all 39 American shots in regulation. But let’s get back to Team USA—I promise I am about to break down the implications of giving a goalie to the losing team in a hockey tournament in great detail if you keep reading a bit longer.

The last time the USA won the men''s hockey world championships was in 1933. NINETEEN THIRTY THREE. They didn’t even know World War I was called World War I.

The last time Team USA won the men’s hockey world championship, the team took a boat to get to Europe and back. The last time Team USA won the men''s hockey world championships, “Team USA” was an amateur team from Boston called the Massachusetts Rangers. The last time Team USA won the men’s hockey world championship, the St. Louis Blues was the hot new song from Louis Armstrong and not the name of an NHL team¹. The last time Team USA won the men’s hockey world championships was the first world championship played on artificial ice. The last time Team USA won the men’s hockey world championships was so long ago that I can use pictures from the tournament because they’re public domain by now.

Everybody that could sue me for using this Wikimedia image of Team USA playing Poland at the 1933 World Championships is dead.

The World Championships have always been a strange event for the Americans. The tournament is held during the NHL playoffs, and it’s almost always held in Europe². That means many of the best American players are unavailable because they're still playing in the postseason, and many of the rest are tired after playing six months of pro hockey and don’t want to spend another three weeks playing more hockey overseas. European players and fans place much more emphasis on the event—I was in Sweden while the worlds were happening a few years ago³, and it was clearly The Big Thing for Swedish sports fans, while it’s pretty much an afterthought here in America, even in the hockey community.

So how did Team USA win this time? The easy story would be to say that for the first time in decades, Team USA took this tournament seriously. But only one of the 23 players from the NHL’s 4 Nations Faceoff roster in February suited up for Team USA, and most of the players likely won’t be on next year’s Olympic roster. (Thompson, who finished third in the NHL in goals, has a pretty good shot.)

Really, we should thank Denmark. The most talented team in the tournament was clearly Canada—but Denmark, which had never finished better than 8th place at worlds, but pulled a miracle comeback in front of a home crowd to turn a late 1-0 deficit against Canada into a 2-1 win, knocking the Canadians out before a potential matchup with Team USA. Denmark promptly got wrecked in the semis and Canada, which should’ve won the tournament, never got to play against Team USA.

With one decades-long streak dead, we’ll see whether Team USA can win its first men’s Olympic gold since 1980 in Milan next year.

The Real MVP

The PWHL Finals may have set the record for Closest Championship Series Ever. All four games went to OT. Game 3 went to triple OT.

Unfortunately for the club from the Canadian capital, Minnesota scored sudden death game-winners in games 2, 3, and 4 to win the championship, their second trophy in a two year old league.⁴ The championship-winning goal came off the stick of Twin Cities native Liz Schepers:

Once again: It’s clear we all need to be watching more women’s hockey. The gold medal match of the World Championships went to overtime. The championship game of the NCAA Tournament went to overtime. Every single game of the PWHL Finals went to overtime. It is impossible for women to play hockey without going to overtime.

This series was so close that the award for Playoff MVP went to Gwyneth Phillips, the goalkeeper for… Ottawa, the team which lost the series. (Phillips, you may remember, subbed into the gold medal match of the IIHF women’s worlds against Canada when Aerin Frankel got injured in the third period, and backstopped Team USA through overtime to get America the gold.) And if you watched the Finals, you know she kinda deserved it. Someone made a supercut of her best saves:

The trophy was for playoff MVP, not Finals MVP, and thus included Phillips's performance in the first round, which included a quadruple overtime game and a shutout against top-seeded Montreal. Over the whole postseason, Philips had a god-tier 1.23 GAA and .952 save percentage… and finished the postseason with four wins and four overtime losses. She spent a whole month standing on her head.⁵

But hot DAMN, giving MVP to the goalkeeper for the losing team is one of the most vicious burns in the history of sports awards. It’s simultaneously a rebuke of the porous defense which allowed shot after shot against Phillips and against the offensive ineptitude that prevented them from getting her a game-winner. Philips and Leonardo Genoni need to link up with Nikola Jokic and learn how the power of harness racing can take an elite athlete’s mind after a heroic performance in a crushing loss.

The Rodger Homerism Section

This year’ Stanford’s women’s golf team may have been the greatest in the history of college golf. The Cardinal entered 10 stroke play tournaments and placed first in all of them, just the second team in NCAA history to win every tournament they played, and the first since 1994. In the NCAA Tournament, they set the all-time records for lowest score in a round (-18) and lowest score to par (-27.) Over four rounds, shot 21 strokes better than second-place Oregon, the only other team to finish the tournament under par.

But unfortunately, the NCAA title is not decided by stroke play. After all the golfers have played four rounds, the top eight teams advance to a single-elimination match play format to decide the champion. I don’t get it. Seems kinda like they strapped extra golfonto a normal golf tournament to add a spritz of excitement into a sport with a perfectly fine method of deciding a champion

And then…

In the national championship match…

The greatest college golf team ever lost…

TO YOUR NORTHWESTERN WILDCATS!!!!!

Even in the championship match, Stanford won more holes than Northwestern… but most of those were in one match, which Stanford won by 5 holes⁶. Northwestern, on the other hand, had two one-hole wins, and sealed the championship on the 18th hole of the fifth matchup to beat Stanford 3-2.

Sure, Stanford should’ve been named NCAA champions based on an utterly dominant performance in the NCAA championship, only to lose by the slimmest of margins in an unnecessary gimmick competition. It’s a sport injustice.

But here’s the thing. When a sports injustice happens to ME 🙋, it's a tragedy. When it happens to YOU 🫵, it's a fascinating upset against incredible odds and the world needs to hear about it. Sorry—simply try not to suffer any tremendouus upsets and you’ll be OK.

The Cats weren’t able to pull the same upset in women's lacrosse, where North Carolina confidently demolished the Wildcats in the championship game to complete an undefeated season… so I’m just not writing about that here!

Some sports you won’t miss

Women’s College World Series: OK, maybe you did miss some of this because I published this on Friday… and it was AWESOME. The WCWS started yesterday and there were two walk-off dingers in four games.

Sorry. We were going nuts about it in the subscriber chat!

Anyway, the championship series is next week, but they’ll go from 8 to 2 over the next few days. Everything’s on ESPN channels.

CONCACAF Champions Cup Final: Posers and casuals will be watching the UEFA Champions League on Saturday. Real heads will be watching the Vancouver Whitecaps against Deportivo Cruz Azul in the North American version. This is Sunday night on FOX Sports 1.

Club World Cup Play-in Game: One of the weirder—and most financially impactful—games of the year, as FIFA decided about two months ago not to let Club Leon participate in its billion-dollar Club World Cup a few months ago because Leon is owned by the same group as Pachuca, which also qualified. So they hastily a one-game playoff between LAFC and Club America, the next teams down in the qualification standings, to see who gets to play in the event. LAFC gets to host (sadly, the play-in is not in Dayton, Ohio) and the winning club gets TEN MILLION DOLLARS just for making the CWC. It’s dumb (and I have a podcast about it you’ll be able to listen to soon.) It’s streaming on “DAZN,” which I hate typing and saying out loud.

1. OK, the St. Louis Blues actually came out in 1914. Jazz had broadly moved onto swing music, which sucks, and is probably the worst genre of jazz music, by the time Team USA won in 1933.

2. The last men’s IIHF world championships in the Americas was in 2008, in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Pretty hard to schedule it in cities with NHL teams.2

3. Actually I literally went to the arena where this year’s championships were held in Stockholm. It’s where Spotify had their big new hire meeting, although we were in the concert space and not the hockey arena.

4. That’s six championships for Minnesota’s women’s pro teams since 2010, and zero championships or championship series appearances for its four men’s teams.

5. I know, like, four hockey expressions, and saying a goalkeeper “standing on their head” is easily my favorite.

6. Sorry, I refuse to acknowledge golf’s nonsense match play scoring terminology. What do you mean the score of the match is “dormie.” What do you mean. What do you mean??? That’s not even a real word.