There can be a lot of blame passed around for Sweden‘s disappointing performance so far in the men’s hockey tournament at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. The Swede’s suffered an embarassing 4-1 loss to their rival Finland during the preliminary round, and had less-than-dominant wins over Italy and Slovakia. A team that had hopes of competing with Canada and the United States for gold now has to play a qualifier against Latvia on Tuesday just to reach the quarterfinals.
Many of the blaming fingers have been pointed at Swedish coach Sam Hallam. Some of his lineup decisions seem bizarre from the outside looking in. He made Filip Forsberg, the fifth-highest scoring Swedish player in the NHL this season, the team’s 13th forward, and has given veteran defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson very little ice time.
On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton were joined by Uffe Bodin to discuss whether the critism Hallam has received is warranted.
Tyler Yaremchuk: There seems to be a lot of outside criticism of Sam Hallam. Is it fair? There’s a lot of people who don’t get to experience Sam Hallam because he’s not in the NHL, but a lot of North American critics are pointing fingers at the OEL thing, and the goaltending, and Filip Forsberg and all of that. Do you view that criticism of Hallam as fair?
Uffe Bodin: Yes and no, because he’s getting a lot of heat over here at home as well. Just for context, he came into this role when he took over for Johan Garpenlov in 2022. Sam Hallam has been extremely successful on the domestic level. He led Vaxjo Lakers to three championship titles, and he was seen as maybe the best Swedish coach we had. So I think everyone in Sweden had really high expectations when he took over from Johan Garpenlov to lead the Swedish team.
However, the 4 Nations last year wasn’t a success. They played well in some games, but not enough to really convince people that they were on to something. There’s a lot of criticism, especially with the past two World Championships, they managed to capture bronze but they were completely outplayed by a young American team in the semifinals in the tournament at home in Stockholm. He had a big spat after the game in a T.V. studio interview with one of the experts, which didn’t really look good on him. So there’s been a lot of criticism against him and what’s gone on in these Olympics hasn’t really helped his case.
You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Tuesday’s episode here…
