After falling behind the U.S. in women’s hockey, can Canada carve a path back to No. 1?
· Yahoo Sports
HERNING, Denmark — While Team USA embarked on a whirlwind victory tour after winning gold at the Milan Olympic women’s hockey tournament — headlined by late-night appearances and cameos on “Saturday Night Live” — all that was left for Team Canada was an autopsy.
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At times in Milan, Canada looked disjointed and was even called “shaky” and “beatable” by Swiss forward Lara Stalder. There were questions all tournament about how the Canadian roster was constructed. Most observers expected the powerhouse Americans to blow Canada out of the rink in the final.
Instead, Canada delivered its best performance of the season, holding a 1-0 lead for nearly 58 minutes before the Americans forced overtime and snatched gold, 2-1.
“This whole tournament, nobody believed in us,” Canadian forward Laura Stacey said after the game. “Nobody thought this would turn into what it did tonight but us. That inner belief, that pride we had for our country, for our jersey and honestly for one another shone through.”
While the Olympic finale was once again decided by inches, the broader results confirmed a power shift has taken place in women’s hockey. The Americans have not lost a game in a major international competition since the 2024 Women’s World Championship gold medal game, which Canada won 6-5 in overtime. Team USA dismantled opponents 33-2 in Milan and had put together an eight-game winning streak against Canada dating back to February 2025.
For Team Canada, however, that’s all in the past. A new Olympic cycle has officially begun, and with that, a fresh start.
Montreal Victoire head coach Kori Cheverie took over behind the bench from longtime coach Troy Ryan, joined by Hockey Hall of Famer Danièle Sauvageau as general manager. Together, they turned over the roster, making difficult veteran cuts and assembling a noticeably younger group – dropping the team’s average age from 29 in Milan to 26 — with an eye toward preventing another silver medal at the 2030 Winter Games.
The 2026 Women’s World Championship in Denmark, which opened last week, has presented the first major opportunity for Canada to showcase its new look on the ice. Through four preliminary round games, Canada has gone 4-0 in Group B, outscoring opponents 26-1, while their American rivals have dominated Group A to clinch the No. 1 seed in the tournament.
New faces have driven Canada’s offense, and several players have already recorded their first senior international goals, including 19-year-old defensive phenom Chloe Primerano and Rosalie Tremblay — who, at 18 years and one month, became the youngest forward to debut for Canada since Marie-Philip Poulin.
“I do believe that is a new era of women’s hockey in Canada,” Cheverie told The Athletic last month. “We’re doing our best to keep trying to win gold medals now and to keep pushing the needle forward.”
The question now: Will all of that be enough to close the gap with Team USA?
U.S. coach John Wroblewski was in a similar position four years ago.
Hired in May 2022, Wroblewski took over an American team that had to settle for silver after losses to Canada at the Beijing Olympics and 2021 world championships. Canada had won four straight against Team USA in international competition and set an all-time Olympic tournament record in Beijing with 57 goals.
With his background coaching elite young players at the U.S. National Team Development Program — working with players such as Jack and Quinn Hughes, Brady Tkachuk, and Matt Boldy — Wroblewski was brought in by USA Hockey to help develop a new young core on the women’s side.
In his first tournament, the 2022 women’s worlds, Wroblewski introduced young star forwards Taylor Fox (née Heise) and Hannah Bilka. He also gave defender Caroline Harvey, who was glued to the bench as a 19-year-old in Beijing, a nudge to play more freely on the offensive blue line.
Fox and Bilka had breakout tournaments, with Fox winning tournament MVP, but Canada beat the U.S. for a third straight gold medal. After the 2022-23 Rivalry Series, where Canada took four straight games by a combined 16-5, Wroblewski had seen enough.
“There’s no way we were going to be able to catch Canada (by 2026) if our older players can’t carry us now,” Wroblewski explained last year. “So then you start considering how you’re gonna circumvent (that) and that’s only through development.”
Over the next two seasons, Wroblewski accelerated the youth movement. He added then-21-year-old Penn State forward Tessa Janecke and 20-year-old defender Haley Winn in 2023. He handed goalie Aerin Frankel the starting job after she had played just one career game at the senior international level. By 2024, NCAA standouts Kirsten Simms, Laila Edwards and Joy Dunne had arrived.
Not every experiment worked. Wroblewski cast a wide net, introducing 15 newcomers over his first three years behind the bench. He also cut star Abbey Murphy after she made her Olympic debut in 2022 — a move he later called a misunderstanding.
By 2025, he had found the right formula, and the scales tilted heavily in Team USA’s favor with the 2026 Olympics right around the corner.
The U.S. beat Canada in both the preliminary round and gold medal game worlds in Czechia, followed by a four-game Rivalry Series sweep by a combined 20-6.
While the Americans loaded up on young talent — building a fast, skilled and dynamic lineup — Canada mostly stuck with its veterans through the entire Olympic cycle. Only eight skaters made their senior international debuts for Canada between 2022 and 2025. When it came time to select the Milan roster, only four — Julia Gosling, Jennifer Gardiner, Sophie Jaques and Daryl Watts — made the cut.
Instead, Canada’s roster featured 16 players from its 2022 Olympic squad, including nine who had played in more than two Olympic tournaments. Team USA brought back 11.
Ryan and longtime general manager Gina Kingsbury were heavily criticized for not injecting more young talent, such as Primerano or Caitlin Kraemer, onto the roster. After Canada suffered its worst loss in Olympic history — a 5-0 shutout at the hands of their rivals — the criticism grew louder. Still, Kingsbury maintained that Canada took the 23 players who gave them the best shot at winning gold.
“Those players were the most ready,” Kingsbury told The Athletic after the tournament. “There is no one we felt was left off that could have made a difference.”
Had Canada given players such as Primerano and Kraemer more chances early in the Olympic cycle, perhaps they would have been more prepared. But Canada was also doing its fair share of winning — with gold medals at the 2022 and 2024 worlds — with its core group.
Kingsbury, whose contract with Hockey Canada ended after the Milan Olympics, believes Canada has young talent on the way — but said they’re just a few years behind the generational American wave.
“We stretched some of our core athletes to give us the best possible chance to win gold,” Kingsbury said. “Now it’s going to be time to turn the page and try to bring a younger group in.”
Longer-term, bridging the gap with Team USA also means developing Canada’s talent pool from the grassroots level. In 2025-26, USA Hockey surpassed 100,000 registered female players for the first time in history. Following the gold medal in Milan, Kristen Sagaert, USA Hockey’s director of girls hockey, said the organization would “knock last year’s number out of the water.”
Hockey Canada hit its own record highs with 121,000 female players that same season, but also has set lofty goals to stay ahead of the curve. Last year, Hockey Canada published “Rise As One,” a blueprint with 14 recommendations on how to grow the game and reach 170,000 girls and women playing hockey by 2030.
“I don’t want to be short-sighted to just get to 2030. We’re looking past to 2040 and 2050,” said Marin Hickox, Hockey Canada’s vice president of women’s hockey. “It’s a numbers game, and in order to make sure that we keep producing the top talent, we really need to make sure we’re widening the base and getting more kids in the game.”
Among the blueprint’s core recommendations are improving funding, securing more ice time and updated facilities and providing more equitable access to quality programming even in smaller provinces. Typically, most senior national team players come from Ontario — with 15 players on the current roster — but Hockey Canada wants to prioritize programming across the country to develop talent farther afield, whether in Newfoundland and Labrador or out west.
As the American pipeline expands beyond traditional markets such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and Michigan — Sagaert identifies Las Vegas, Seattle and Utah as emerging girls hockey markets — Canada needs to do the same domestically.
If the recommended changes are implemented by 2028, as outlined by the blueprint, it will take years to bear fruit for Team Canada.
In the meantime, there are games to be won in Denmark.
When assembling their first world championship roster, Cheverie and Sauvageau made the difficult call to move on from program mainstays like four-time Olympians Brianne Jenner and Jocelyne Larocque. With other vacancies — given Poulin remains sidelined after knee surgery and Blayre Turnbull is pregnant with her first child — they infused the lineup with seven players making their international debuts, including college stars and proven PWHL producers.
That included recalling Jessie Eldridge alongside first-time selections such as Kendall Cooper and Rebecca Leslie.
Eldridge won gold with Canada in 2022, but fell out of the national team rotation, despite establishing herself as one of the most productive players in the PWHL; only Poulin, Daryl Watts and Alex Carpenter have scored more goals than Eldridge since the league launched in January 2024.
Leslie earned her debut after a breakout season in Ottawa, where she put up 23 points in 30 games. Cooper, a rookie last season, was one of the highest-scoring defenders in the league, behind only Jaques and Defender of the Year Megan Keller.
“At the beginning of any quad, you have an opportunity to try different things and to look at different players, and maybe cast your net quite wide to see what you have,” Cheverie explained. “And that’s the stage that we’re in.”
In their first game, an exhibition contest against Team USA, Canada’s new-look roster got a much-needed 5-3 win to snap their eight-game losing streak. The second exhibition contest, a 4-0 loss, wasn’t particularly close. But, as Cheverie said, it would be naive to expect “all rainbows and butterflies” with a new team.
Under its new leadership, Canada is prioritizing pushing the pace and improving its offense, while also giving its young core immediate responsibility. Tremblay has been Canada’s No. 1 center since training camp, an opportunity the team can afford to hand out so early in an Olympic cycle. Primerano is the power play quarterback, while Kraemer leads all skaters in ice time. All 25 players named to the roster have drawn into the lineup as well, including all three goalies.
“We want to try to set them up for success and expose them to real-life situations,” said Cheverie. “Ultimately, that’s how they’re going to develop the most.”
That new approach has worked well so far. Canada scored 26 goals through the preliminary round — more than the team managed throughout the entire Milan Olympics (22) or last year’s worlds prelims (17).
Eldridge is leading Canada in scoring; both she and Kraemer have registered at least one point in each of Canada’s first four games. Primerano and Cooper are scoring at a point-per-game clip, and six of Canada’s seven new skaters have scored at least once.
Much of that progress — and 19 of those goals — has come against lower-ranked competition. Should the Canadians take care of business in the knockout stage, which starts with a quarterfinal test against Czechia on Friday, they’ll meet the powerhouse Americans in Monday’s gold medal game.
It will be the first true test of Canada’s new era.
— Also reported from Windsor, Ont.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
NHL, Women's Hockey
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