Storylines aplenty with Russia-Czech final

I started obviously hinting at it a bit yesterday in recapping the semifinals, but I can say for sure now that this gold-medal game between the Czech Republic and Russia provides enough intrigue for me to fill a boat. The storylines are easy to write up here. The Czechs have been perpetually on the brink of being bounced out of the tournament in every round and yet here they are in the gold-medal game of the World Championships. They are the survivors, the team surviving on the high of being that close to elimination and thriving on the opportunity to crush those eager to send them packing. Instead, they're manning up in a big way and have wreaked havoc upon Scandinavia eliminating both Finland and Sweden in the shootout during the elimination round of the tournament.

For the Czechs, it's truly a team effort being overshadowed by a tremendous goaltender. Tomas Vokoun has been the peacemaker for the Czech Republic, stopping shots at a .935 percentage throughout the tournament and having a goals against average of just 1.65. Even though the sample size is small (eight games), the effort is there consistently and it's one less thing the Czechs have to worry about going into any game. Instead, the Czechs have harped upon team play, tightened up defense and goal scoring from whoever they can get it from. Jaromir Jagr is the main man and the lightning rod for attention from each team's defensive pair, but his getting upset about not having some of the Czechs better players in this tournament seems to have inspired those he is playing with to be their best. While Jagr is one of three players leading his team in scoring, there are others like Jan Marek, Jiri Novotny and Tomas Rolinek who are all adding their own touches to the team as well. You'd be hard pressed to say that not everyone on the team is carrying their weight, they're all doing a tremendous job together.

For coach Vyacheslav Bykov's Russian team, it's all about continuing to own this tournament and to do so as a team and not as a pack of individual stars with their own egos to attend to. With a team as loaded with great stars as Russia is, it's easy to see why that might be an issue. Games like yesterday's semifinal against Germany were the sorts of games previous Russian teams may have cracked and folded in with the stars all trying to do their own thing. Instead they cycled, they helped each other out and they came away with a win. In a way, it's a brand of resilience of their own creation only that it's tough to talk about how a team that hasn't lost a game in this tournament since 2007 is resilient in any way. Funny what a bad Olympics loss will do. Regardless, the winner of today's gold medal game will have quite the story to share with the world.