Forsberg To Play; Canada Undoubtedly Dismayed

It's never easy to win a tournament like the Olympic Men's Hockey competition, but it seems the path to Olympic glory has been cleared somewhat for our neighbors to the north. Consider the luck and other circumstances that have befallen pre-tourney favorite Canada's top competition:

• The Czech Republic has lost arguably the best goaltender of his generation (Dominik Hasek, who is in the midst of a Vezina-caliber season in the NHL) and arguably its second-best forward (Patrik Elias).
  
• Sweden lost a top-line forward (Markus Naslund) and two of its better defensemen (Mattias Norstrom and Kim Johnsson) before the tournament even started, and was without its best player (Peter Forsberg) for a critical game against Russia that they lost.
• The United States inexpicably decided to leave its best goaltender (Ryan Miller) off the roster.
• Finland's two best goalies (Miikka Kiprusoff and Kari Lehtonen) pulled out of the tournament before it started.
• Russia is without its best netminder (Nikolai Khabibulin) too, as well as two-way defenseman Alexei Zhitnik.
• Slovakia has Ivan Majesky on its roster.

To be fair, Canada has suffered some key injuries too, notably to blueliners Scott Niedermayer and Ed Jovanovski, which has left their depleted d-corps with only two Norris Trophy winners instead of three and forced them to put the NHL's third-leading defenseman scorer in the lineup. Hopefully they can pull together as a team and overcome this obstacle.

All of the above leads up to this: in light of the way things seem to be falling into place for Team Canada, I was surprised to read today that Forsberg has declared himself fit to play for the rest of the tournament. But maybe he'll re-injure himself before the medal round. The way things are going for the non-Canadian hockey world so far, it might be worth calling up Rick Tocchet and placing a wager on.