Team USA's Olympic hockey decisions continue to look worse

The United States men's Olympic hockey team is going to enter the tournament in Italy next month as a medal contender. It is a very good team on paper, and one of the best they have ever sent to the Olympics. 

The problem is the roster is not as good as it could be, or perhaps should be, as the brain trust behind it continued to get stuck in the same outdated mindset that has limited them in so many best-on-best tournaments. 

The biggest issue the Americans have in these tournaments is that they can never score enough goals in the most important games when the competition is at its best. It happens repeatedly. In the past, a shallow talent pool was easy to blame for at least part of that.

That is no longer the case as the American talent pool is deeper than it has ever been, but management refuses to fully tap into it. 

Instead of simply taking their best, most talented players, they continue to try to build their roster like it is an NHL team with NHL constraints. Instead of taking top goal-scorers like Jason Robertson (Dallas Stars), Cole Caufield (Montreal Canadiens) and Alex DeBrincat (Detroit Red Wings) for this year's team, they took role players and "glue guys" like New York Rangers teammates J.T. Miller and Vincent Trocheck.

They looked like bad decisions at the time. Those decisions continue to look worse as the Olympics get closer. 

Team USA roster snubs making management look bad

While the most controversial inclusions on the roster, specifically Miller and Trocheck, continue to struggle for a Rangers team that is one of the worst in the NHL, some of the biggest snubs are shining. 

On Friday night, Robertson scored his 30th goal of the season for Dallas. That not only keeps him atop the goal-scoring list among American-born players, but it also ties him for second in the entire NHL. His omission remains one of the most stunning ones since NHL players started playing in the Olympics at the 1998 Nagano games. 

On Saturday, Caufield recorded a hat trick to give him 29 goals on the season. That puts him into the top five in the entire NHL. He and fellow Team USA snub, defenseman Lane Hutson, also just put on a show this past week against the Minnesota Wild, teaming up for a highlight reel game-winning goal in the third period. Wild general manager Bill Guerin is also the general manager for Team USA and had a front-row seat for it.

Along with those performances, DeBrincat also scored his 27th goal of the season on Saturday night for the Red Wings. That also places him in the top-10 in the league.

All of this means that as of Saturday, five of the top-10 goal-scorers in the NHL are American-born players.

Only two of them (Tage Thompson of the Buffalo Sabres and Matt Boldy of the Wild) are on the Olympic roster. 

There is no way to sugarcoat how bad that looks for the American team-building process. Management better hope they win, because if they lose once again due to a lack of goal-scoring, they are going to have some serious questions to answer.