How is anybody going to stop Canada's power play at Olympics?

The Canadian men's hockey team has an embarrassment of riches in terms of talent. Their talent pool is so deep that Hockey Canada could probably put together a second roster that would also contend for a gold medal in any best-on-best tournament. 

That talent was on display in Thursday's 5-0 preliminary-round game against Czechia to open their 2026 Winter Olympics experience.

A lot of the usual suspects were involved when it comes to the offense, but at no point did Canada's superiority seem more apparent than when they went on the power play and the five players they could send over the boards.

How will anybody stop Canada's power play?

Canada's top power-play unit on Thursday featured Sidney Crosby (Pittsburgh Penguins), Connor McDavid (Edmonton Oilers), Nathan MacKinnon (Colorado Avalanche), Sam Reinhart (Florida Panthers) and defenseman Cale Makar (Avalanche). 

Between the five of them you have eight NHL scoring titles, seven MVP awards, seven Stanley Cup rings and a Norris Trophy (as NHL's best defenseman). 

If you go back to the start of the 2022-23 season, MacKinnon, McDavid and Reinhart are the fourth, fifth and sixth leading goal-scorers in the NHL during that stretch, while Makar is the top-scoring defenseman in the NHL and has a 20-goal lead over the next-closest player. And then you have Crosby, who is 16th in the NHL in goals over that stretch and arguably one of the top five players in NHL history.

This season alone, McDavid and MacKinnon are in a back-and-forth race for the league scoring title, and both are likely to be MVP finalists again.  

Pretty much every team in the tournament is, to some degree, a team of NHL All-Stars, but Canada is able to take it to an entirely different level. Especially when it can put these five players on the ice together.

They connected for a goal on Thursday, and made it look effortless as Crosby and McDavid set up MacKinnon for an easy tap-in goal. 

Beating Canada is not going to be easy under any circumstances, but there should be one objective that every team has when playing them — stay out of the penalty box. They are going to be favorites in just about every game they play, and even at five-on-five they are going to have a chance to outplay every team. But when you give them an opportunity to go up a man, and then put that group on the ice, there is not going to be anybody that will be able to consistently stop them.