It was a rather unfortunate opening day of men’s ice hockey at the 2026 Winter Olympics for Nashville Predators fans.<\/p>\n
Filip Forsberg was surprisingly demoted to the 13th forward position in Sweden’s game against Itlay and Juuse Saros was on the losing end of Finland’s 4-1 result to Slovakia.<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
In his Olympic debut, Saros gave up three goals on 24 shots and made 21 saves. Slovakia’s final goal was an empty net.<\/p>\n
Juraj Slafkovsky opened the scoring 7:45 into the game, deking Saros out and causing him to go down, which allowed Slafkovsky to put the puck into a wide-open net.<\/p>\n
Finland tied the game early in the second period, but Slovakia went on to score three unanswered goals in the third period.<\/p>\n
A shot from Martin Gernat came off of Finland’s Sebastian Aho, and Dalibor Dvorsky was there to put away the rebound on Saros’s five-hole.<\/p>\n
The third goal came on the power play as\u00a0Slafkovsky went bardown on Saros for his second goal of the game.<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
Saros is now 0-3-0 in best-on-best tournaments as he went 0-2 in the 4 Nations Face-Off.<\/p>\n
Erika Haula also logged\u00a010:39 of ice time on 17 shifts and two shots on goal in his Olympic debut with Finland.<\/p>\n
In the second game, the hockey world was shocked to see Forsberg placed in the 13th forward position, which is often the extra forward carried and usually scratched.<\/p>\n
The Predators alternate captain logged just one shift for\u00a01:07 of ice time in Sweden’s 5-2 win over Italy.<\/p>\n
It’s speculated that Sweden is resting Forsberg for bigger games, but it’s head-scratching that it chose to bench the player who is 16th all-time amongst Swedes in the NHL and has 47 points in 57 games this season.<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
Switzerland also announced that Roman Josi will be its captain for the Olympics.<\/p>\n
Feb. 12 (Thursday): Switzerland (Josi) vs. France at 5:10 a.m. CST.<\/p>\n
Feb 13 (Friday): Finland (Haula & Saros) vs. Sweden (Forsberg) at 5:10 a.m. CST; Switzerland (Josi) vs. Canada at 2:10 p.m. CST.<\/p>\n
Feb. 14 (Saturday): Sweden (Forsberg) vs. Slovakia at 5:10 a.m. CST; Finland (Saros & Haula) vs. Italy at 9:40 a.m. CST.<\/p>\n
Feb. 15 (Sunday): Switzerland (Josi) vs. Czechia at 5:10 a.m. CST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a rather unfortunate opening day of men’s ice hockey at the 2026 Winter Olympics for Nashville…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5119],"tags":[3189,3577,4151,55640,5,976,1500,55641,2409,231,5281,4,2410,1501,1174,1718],"class_list":{"0":"post-458342","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nashville-predators","8":"tag-2026-winter-olympics","9":"tag-filip-forsberg","10":"tag-finland","11":"tag-forward-position","12":"tag-hockey","13":"tag-juraj-slafkovsky","14":"tag-juuse-saros","15":"tag-martin-gernat","16":"tag-nashville","17":"tag-nashville-predators","18":"tag-nashvillepredators","19":"tag-nhl","20":"tag-predators","21":"tag-roman-josi","22":"tag-sebastian-aho","23":"tag-sweden"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116071689364346376","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}