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Letters: 3-on-3 overtime no way to end a gold-medal hockey game

Readers comment on the Olympic Games, Parliamentary shenanigans, defence spending, questionable judicial decisions, plus more

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‘Legacies are on the line’

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Re: Canada should have won with McDavid, MacKinnon and Makar— Steve Simmons, Feb. 23 (National Post print; Toronto Sun online)

Letters: 3-on-3 overtime no way to end a gold-medal hockey game Back to video

Steve Simmons correctly observed that “Nobody likes ending gold-medal games or any Olympic hockey games for that matter with 3-on-3 play.” But, as an arbitrary rule, this is not about preference or taste. It is about whether it is appropriate for an Olympic final. It is not.

Three-on-three overtime is a successful regular-season mechanism in plenty of hockey leagues. It reduces the game to open ice and individual skill. But in a gold-medal final, that is insufficient. The NHL has long understood this. Playoff hockey, one of the most thrilling sporting events, has infinite 5-on-5 overtime.

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An Olympic championship should test the full architecture of the sport — depth, structure, line matchups, and chemistry. Three skaters per side cannot do that. Five-on-five, as long as necessary, is the only format that should decide a game of such magnitude.

This is not to detract from the stellar American performance. I just hope that before 2030, the International Olympic Committee recognizes what the NHL has long known: when legacies are on the line, the game must be decided as it is actually played. Olympic gold deserves nothing less.

Max Thomson, Torrance, Ont.

Let’s be magnanimous. The Americans, with their current president, needed the gold-medal wins for men and women’s hockey more than we did.

Terry Welty, Red Deer, Alta.

‘Fully fund our Olympic athletes’ — or maybe not

Re: Canada chose its Olympic decline — Jamie Sarkonak, Feb. 24

Canadian Olympic athletes would well be within their rights to ask why our federal government can dole out taxpayer money to a plethora of causes — health care for asylum seekers, when many Canadians don’t have doctors; rebates for those wishing to buy electric vehicles; money for UNWRA, where money is purportedly funnelled to Hamas, to name a few — yet fails to adequately fund our Olympians.

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Every four years Canadian politicians rally around our Olympic athletes and then fall silent for the next three years. It is clearly time that taxpayers demand that........

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