Why Hockey Canada must rethink the women's program right after these Olympics — not later

For almost 58 minutes on Thursday night in Milan, Hockey Canada was getting ready to serve its doubters a big, heaping plate of told-you-so.

The women’s hockey team, the one that was too old, too slow, too full of veterans who couldn’t keep up with the fresh-faced American college kids, had been doing exactly that.

The pre-Olympic assurances from leaders like general manager Gina Kingsbury and head coach Troy Ryan, who insisted that they brought the best Canadians available and that all those veterans would make the difference in the light and heat of a gold-medal game, were looking awfully prophetic.

And then, well, you know what happened. Team USA had some veterans, too. Hilary Knight tied it up with the goalie pulled. Megan Keller scored the overtime winner. Gold medal to the Americans. Heartbreak for the Canadians.

The tears, especially for the Canadians playing in their last Olympics, were inevitable. The question is whether there should be recriminations, too.

That narrow loss may end up standing as evidence that everything is tickety-boo in the women’s hockey program. After all, would anyone be calling for a Hockey Canada revolution if Knight’s deflection of a shot from the blue line had gone over the crossbar instead of under it, or if Daryl Watts had been able to finish off an overtime rush instead of having the puck roll off her stick as she approached the American net?

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But one almost-but-not-quite heroic performance from Team Canada’s women shouldn’t overshadow the many valid questions that had been raised about the diverging fortunes of the U.S. and Canadian programs in the build up to that gold-medal game.

It is now eight straight wins for the United States over Canada in competitive play, stretching back to last year’s world championships. Hockey Canada might note that the two most important of those games, the gold-medal finals, were both overtime victories for the Americans, proof that the margin between the teams is paper-thin when the stakes are at their highest.

But it is also true that Team USA has walloped Canada several times over that period, including in the pool round at Milan 2026. The Canadians haven’t come close to a dominant performance over their rivals despite all those opportunities for one.

Some of the Milan post-mortem should naturally focus on team selection. Ryan and Kingsbury had said before the Olympics, after Canada had been thoroughly pantsed by the Americans in the four-game Rivalry Series last fall, that Canada simply didn’t have the wealth of young talent, all blooming at the same time, that Team USA brought to Milan. By this time the details can by recited by rote: nine Americans under the age of 24, and seven of them in college. Canada in those categories: zero and zero.

But while it’s true that the next PWHL draft will be dominated at the top by those Americans who played in Milan, it’s also fair to wonder if Canada would have benefited from an injection of youth, whether from the PWHL or NCAA ranks. There were viable Canadian choices in either pool.

That point is, obviously, moot now. More important is whether there are structural changes that should be made to the Canadian system to close what sure looks like a widening gap to the Americans.

Canada has long benefited from the fact that there is a rink in every town and a wide network of girls’ hockey leagues. The best players filter upward to the best travel teams and eventually into the Hockey Canada sphere of influence. But some observers have suggested that the organization needs to be more proactive in identifying talented girls at younger ages and getting them into elite pipelines, whether that is through something like the U.S. National Team Development Program or a series of more structured regional development nodes.

(Similar questions, it is worth noting, have been asked for years on the men’s side, where the bulk of Canadian talent comes up through the major-junior leagues because that’s the way it has always been done.)

It might seem odd to suggest that a tournament should stand as a wake-up call when Team Canada came so close to being Olympic champions again. But organizations often take the wrong lessons from close losses, failing to admit that one strong performance might have papered over the cracks.

Take, to pick just one example, the Toronto Maple Leafs of the past decade or so, who kept losing in heart-breaking fashion, kept running it back, and now finding themselves wondering if they should have blown it all up five years ago.

The Canadian women’s hockey program, to state the blindingly obvious, is in an entirely different situation. They win things, for one. But even great organizations can slide into long fallow periods if they fail to adjust to changing times even when results are relatively good.

The worst mistake that Hockey Canada could make, out of the events of Milan, is deciding that it was right all along.