Get ready to hear an awful lot about goal differential the next few days.
Because of the chaos in Group B in the men’s Olympic hockey tournament, it’s now highly likely that two of the best three teams in the event will face one another in a do-or-die quarterfinal next week.
The reasons why come down to some of the odd tiebreak scenarios in the Olympics format. Because Sweden, Finland and Slovakia will have tied atop the group with the same number of points, they are separated by their goal differential in the three games they played against one another.
Those three games:
Slovakia 4, Finland 1
Finland 4, Sweden 1
Sweden 5, Slovakia 3
Goal differential in those games:
Slovakia: +1
Finland: 0
Sweden: -1
In the end, Dalibor Dvorsky’s…