Canada lost momentum with Crosby injury

Canada might’ve avoided a scare, but it might have a bigger problem on its hands.

During the team’s quarterfinal game against Czechia on Wednesday, Canada captain Sidney Crosby suffered an injury after taking a hit from Czech defenseman Radko Gudas. The collision took Crosby out of the game, leaving Canada without arguably the team’s most important player.

The absence of their captain looked to have taken the wind out of the Canadians’ sails. Despite tying the game at two shortly thereafter, the team looked a little lost without No. 87.

Thankfully, the injury didn’t force the team to go home, as Canada came back late in regulation to force overtime, with Mitch Marner scoring the winner in the extra frame.

During the postgame show on Daily Faceoff, Jeff Marek and Tyler Yaremchuk explained how Crosby’s injury took momentum away from Canada.

Jeff Marek: With Crosby out, they really seemed off. Passes weren’t clicking. Nathan MacKinnon looked indecisive at a lot of times. There was actually that play towards the end of the third period where I thought he hurt himself. He starts to limp a little bit; now he’s caught out on a long shift. What did you make of the second and the lack of Sidney Crosby effect here? Because it seemed like a lot of the wind of the sails for Canada went out of those sails as soon as Crosby was announced that not coming back

Tyler Yaremchuk: I think what we saw is once Sidney Crosby was out – full credit to Nick Suzuki, he stepped up and played really, really well. I think running those big three [McDavid, MacKinnon, Celebrini] all together on the top line, it’s a little bit less feasible without Sidney Crosby. We kind of saw that. I know I tweeted it like, ‘Hey, you can run the big dogs and trust that everybody else is going to break even.’ That is kind of exactly what ended up happening. I think going forward, if there is no Sid, I don’t know if you can keep running those big three together and trust that the rest of that lineup is going to be good enough.

You can watch the full segment and entire show here…