Canada cruises to 3-0 victory over Switzerland in women's world hockey

There may be a day when Switzerland defeats Canada in the IIHF Women’s World Tournament, but that day was not Friday at the Adirondack Bank Center.

Canada certainly wasn’t its sharpest in its second game of the tournament, but it really didn’t need to be in coasting to a 3-0 victory over a team it has historically dominated.

The teams have now played 20 times in this event since 1997 and Canada has won every game by a rather incredible cumulative score of 155-9.

So yes, the fact that the Swiss kept it as close they did was an accomplishment given their ignominious history against one of the superpowers in women’s hockey.

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“I thought we played played quite well; we sort of grew into the game,” Swiss coach Collin Muller said. “Started off slowly giving up two goals early on, and then I thought we handled our situations pretty good. I mean we knew they were gonna come, they’re a big team. It’s a process and I think we’ve come along and took a good step today going forward.”

Part of Canada’s sluggishness probably could be centered on the fact that it beat Finland 4-1 for its 100th all-time victory in this tournament Thursday night and then had to turn around 20 hours later to play a Swiss team that had opened the tournament on Wednesday with a 4-0 loss to Team USA and thus had extra rest. And still, the Canadians owned a lopsided 45-17 shots on goal advantage.

“I think we were a little bit worried coming in looking at the schedule and seeing the 7 (Thursday) and 3 (Friday),” said Sarah Nurse, who scored Canada’s second goal. “But I think that our staff do a great job of setting us up for success.

“I think it’s funny, a lot of people talk about our age and obviously we’re a little bit older than the other teams in the tournament, but we have that experience, we have that knowledge of how to prepare ourselves for a quick tight turnaround game and we know the game that we need to play. This is a big game, you can’t lose this game, so we knew what we had to do and I think we executed a lot of things that we had spoken about earlier this morning.”

Canada scored the only goal it would need just 70 seconds into the game. Natalie Spooner fired a low shot that Switzerland goalie Andrea Braendli stopped, but she left a juicy rebound just outside the blue paint and Emma Maltais was able to bang in the rebound before Braendli could recover.

It was a rare mistake for Braendli who was the only reason Canada could not pull away as she stopped 42 shots.

Canada bumped its advantage to 2-0 at 7:46 thanks to its relentless forecheck. It had already spent almost the entire time to that point in the Swiss end and it finally led to a bad mistake and a goal.

Switzerland captain Lara Stalder turned the puck over at the the blue line to Nurse who quickly swooped in through the right faceoff circle and wristed one home to make it 2-0.

“They ended up turning the puck over to me and shooting through a screen is something that I’m very familiar with and so I saw the opportunity to do that and it went in the net,” Nurse said matter of factly.

Early in the second period the Swiss had an opportunity to break through. They had a power play in the first minute and then a second penalty on Canada gave them a two-man advantage for 1:30, but they didn’t even manage a shot on goal.

Part of the problem was they were trying to set up the perfect shot and passed up at least two good looks.

“We had the 5-on-3 early on, but we haven’t really had any time to practice,” said Muller. “We’ve had like four or five practices together as a team and it’s not so easy to cover all the system details. It’s simple plays and those are things at this level that you have to do well. Right now we can’t find it.”

For the rest of the afternoon Switzerland simply could not maintain control of the puck in the offensive zone and Canada goalie Emerance Maschmeyer, who didn’t even see a shot on goal the first 16 minutes, had very little to do.

Sarah Fillier closed the scoring with an empty netter with 19.3 seconds remaining.

Despite the loss, and the fact that his team has yet to score in the tournament, Muller was pleased with the effort in the two losses to the best two teams in the world to start, USA on Wednesday and then Canada.

“I thought we played played quite well; we sort of grew into the game,” he said. “Started off slowly giving up two goals early on, and then I thought we handled our situations pretty good. I mean we knew they were gonna come, they’re a big team. It’s a process and I think we’ve come along and took a good step today going forward.”

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana. To subscribe to Sal's newsletter, Bills Blast, which comes out every other Friday during the offseason, please follow this link: https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Canada blanks Switzerland 3-0 in IIHF women's world hockey tournament