Can the NHL's Olympic past tell us anything about what to expect in Sochi?

After four years of waiting, the puck is finally about to drop on the Sochi Olympics men’s hockey tournament.

The NHL began sending its best to the Games in 1998, making this the fifth time the Olympics have truly been a best-on-best tournament. We’ve seen three different countries win gold and six nations earn at least one medal. There have been stunning upsets and predictable blowouts. But as we look back over those 16 years, some patterns begin to emerge.

OK, sure, we’re dealing with just four tournaments. Is that too small a sample size to draw legitimately meaningful conclusions from? Yes, it probably is. Are we going to try to do it anyway? You’re damn right we are.

So here are 10 lessons we’ve learned from the NHL’s Olympic history, and what they might mean for Sochi.

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Lesson 1: Round-robin dominance won’t matter much.

Since 1998, eight teams have gone undefeated during the round-robin portion of the tournament. Not one those teams has gone on to win gold. Four of them didn’t even manage to win a medal. That includes Slovakia, which ran the table at 5-0-0 in 2006 and then immediately lost in the quarterfinals, as well as Sweden, which was 3-0-0 in 2002 and then had this happen.

By comparison, the four gold-medal winners combined to go a rather pedestrian 8-5-1, and not one finished in first place in their group.

This year, all 12 teams will advance to the elimination round. It’s nice if you can get a good enough seed to avoid running into a powerhouse early. But perfection doesn’t matter.

If history repeats: Given the format, in which each group of four has one or two weaklings, there will almost certainly be two or three perfect teams after the round-robin. We’ll all overreact, and assume they’re unbeatable. They won’t be.

Lesson 2: The tournament’s best player will probably be a goalie.

In each of the past two Games, the goalie named to the All-Star team has also been named tournament MVP — Antero Niittymaki in 2006, and Ryan Miller in 2010. And while they didn’t name All-Stars or an MVP in 1998, if they had, Dominik Hasek would have been a lock. The only exception to the “goalie as best player” rule was 2002, when Mike Richter lost out on MVP honors to Juh-yoe Sakic.

And of course, that’s exactly what you’d expect in a single-game elimination tournament. This is hockey, where a hot goalie is the great equalizer. It’s not that the team that gets the best goaltending is guaranteed gold (of the goalies above, only Hasek won it all), but it can get you awfully close.

Maybe the more interesting observation is that you never really know which goalie it’s going to be. Hasek was the best in the world, and Miller was in the middle of a Vezina season. But Richter was a borderline star on his last legs, and Niittymaki was a 25-year-old NHL rookie splitting time with Robert Esche.

If history repeats: Some team is going to go way further than we expect because their goalie stands on his head. This would be a good time to start getting nervous about Tuukka Rask.

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Olympic women's hockey: Your guide to Canada vs. the US (and those six other teams)

Imagine if the Stanley Cup or the World Series or the Super Bowl was only played once every four years. No playoffs, no best-of-seven. Just one game, winner-take-all, and then it’s over.

Now imagine that we already knew, with virtual certainty, which teams would be in that game. Those two teams could spend four years training, practicing, perfecting their rosters and strategies, and playing each other all over the world in preparation for that one game that would decide everything. Four long years, just to get to 60 short minutes that would settle everything.

Oh, and did we mention that the two teams seem to hate each other?

We’re two weeks away from watching that game. Welcome to Canada vs. the USA, and the world of women’s Olympic hockey.

First Things First

Women’s hockey is not men’s hockey.

Yes, that’s a stupefyingly obvious thing to point out, but some people still seem to have trouble with it. Despite the overwhelming similarities to men’s hockey, there are some key differences. Bodychecking is illegal. The skating is noticeably slower. You won’t see any 100 mph slap shots. Players with long hair have actual long hair, not ratty mullets.

Two things can be slightly different and still both be fun. You can live with that, right? Good, because the tournament starts Saturday. Let’s get to the good stuff.

A Brief History of the U.S.-Canada Rivalry

Women have been playing organized hockey in North America since the 19th century, with the first game reportedly played in Ottawa in the 1890s. But we didn’t get an internationally sanctioned tournament until 1990, with the inaugural IIHF World Women’s Championship. Canada and the U.S. met in the gold-medal game, with Canada winning 5-2. They met in the next two championships as well, in 1992 and 1994, both of which were won by Canada by a combined score of 14-3. But the U.S. started quickly closing the gap, and the 1997 final was closer; Canada needed overtime to win 4-3.

The sport debuted at the Nagano Olympics in 1998, where Team USA won gold by finally beating Canada in what was considered an upset. Canada won the next five major tournaments, including the 2002 Olympics, before the U.S. reclaimed the world title in 2005. Since then, the U.S. has won four of six world championships, while Canada won gold at both the 2006 and 2010 Olympics.

If you’re counting, that’s 19 consecutive major tournaments that have been won by either Canada or the U.S., with the two teams facing each other in 18 of those finals. (The one exception: The 2006 Olympics, when Sweden shocked the U.S. in a shootout during the semifinal.) The two teams also play each other in occasional secondary tournaments and tune-up games, including seven games at the end of last year, which saw Canada win the first three before the U.S. finished with four consecutive wins.

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The 2014 Olympic trade deadline

Hello, fans around the world, and welcome to our coverage of the 2014 Olympic hockey trade deadline. With all national rosters due today, this is the last chance for countries to trade players before locking in their lineups.

Rumors have been swirling for months and the tension is high, so let's go live to our studios as we count down to the deadline …

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OK, we'll stop right there. Clearly, the entire premise of this column is ridiculous. The Olympic hockey trade deadline doesn't exist, and never could. It wouldn't even make any sense. After all, player eligibility is determined based on a detailed set of rules; that's the whole point. If stars suddenly started suiting up for different countries at major international tournaments, hockey fans wouldn't stand for it. So clearly, there can be no such thing as an Olympic trade deadline.

But what if there were? You're telling me that a trade deadline wouldn't make an already fun tournament even more entertaining? You wouldn't spend weeks obsessing over possible moves as the deadline approached, then call in sick when the actual day arrived? At the very least, it would give the various general managers something to do besides picking an all-star roster, immediately apologizing for it, and then having a camera isolated on them during every game while they look like they're undergoing cardiac arrest.

So yes, this whole thing is silly, will probably result in the majority of the world's population hating me, and risks turning into the worst HFBoards thread ever. But that doesn't mean we can't waste a few thousand words on it. Who's with me? That's what I thought. We now return you to our trade desk …

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And we're back. There could be plenty of action today, as the top contenders are all looking to load up. Russia is under tremendous pressure to win gold on home ice. Team Canada, as always, will either win gold or be considered a national disgrace. Team USA will be looking to build on a surprising 2010 run that saw them fall just one goal shy of winning it all, while Sweden's aging core wants to get back to the top of the medal stand one last time. And what about the quasi-contenders? Will they try to compete with the big boys, or look to rebuild for the future?

Anything can happen. Remember, everyone is eligible to be moved, including players who didn't make their country's final roster. And based on the flurry of cell-phone checking that's currently going on behind me, we appear to have our first deal of the day. Cue the overly elaborate, swooshing "breaking trade" graphic.

Canada trades forward Logan Couture to Finland for goaltender Kari Lehtonen

On the surface, this one-for-one swap makes a lot of sense. Canada's roster is stacked as always, but goaltending is still an area of concern. Carey Price has looked fine and Roberto Luongo won gold four years ago, but the country has been falling behind the rest of the world in goal for years, and the days when it could bank on an obvious choice like Martin Brodeur or Patrick Roy are long gone. With Luongo's health status suddenly in question, it's not surprising that it wants to add some depth at the position.

Lehtonen will give Canada a safety net and could push for the starter's job if Price falters. He's far from a sure thing, but he's arguably the best goalie who'd be available. And Finland can certainly afford to move him, with Tuukka Rask already firmly established as the starter and Antti Niemi backing up.

The move doesn't come cheap for Canada, as Couture has already emerged as an excellent two-way player at the age of 24. But for whatever reason, Team Canada didn't seem high on him, and he was a somewhat surprising omission from the roster announced today. So he goes to Finland, which is considered a long shot to win a medal this year, where he can step in and play on its top six right now as well as in 2018 and beyond.

Canada has made an early blockbuster move. Which will be the next teams to pull the trigger? Apparently we won't have to wait long to find out, because we have another deal coming across the wire.

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Grantland: What are Canadian hockey fans panicking about now?

Canada is generally a fairly calm nation. As long as our beer is cold, our bacon is crisp, and somebody doesn’t try to order a breakfast sandwich in the Tim Hortons drive-through and make the entire neighborhood 45 minutes late for work, we’re a pretty laid-back people.

But there’s one glaring exception to that rule: hockey. We can occasionally get a little intense about that. And that’s especially true when the Olympics are involved, since there are only two possible outcomes for Team Canada — a gold medal, or a crushing, humiliating failure that ends with all the players being herded onto an ice floe in the Bay of Fundy.

Last week, Team Canada held its initial orientation camp, in which 47 potential Olympians were invited to get together in Calgary. Because of insurance issues, there were no actual on-ice workouts. The event consisted entirely of a friendly few days of team-building, walkthroughs, and photo ops. Needless to say, this plunged Canadian hockey fans into chaos.

And so, in what may need to become a regular feature around here between now and February, here’s a look at some of the Olympic-related topics that your neighbors to the north are currently in a state of abject panic about.

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