Olympic Hockey Reflections with Sean Shapiro

It's been a great couple weeks of hockey

Photo credit: Pavel Marianov

With the 2026 Winter Olympic Games set to wrap up in dramatic fashion on Sunday, there’s no time like the present to reflect on everything we’ve seen along the way in Milano Cortina.

To do that, I’ve teamed up with my pal Sean Shapiro, whom you all know and surely love. His work is found in many places, but some of my favorite writing he does is over at Shap Shots, which you ought to be reading.

Sean and I have both had a blast watching Olympic hockey from afar, so we decided to have an extended back-and-forth while watching a Mikko Rantanen-less Finland win a bronze medal by defeating Slovakia on Saturday.

We discussed things we loved about the year we got to see NHLers back in the Olympics, as well as some things we would change, and even a tad bit of unhinged speculation (that last bit mostly by me).

Enjoy, or at least don’t complain too loudly.

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Sean: With the 2026 Winter Olympics set to conclude tomorrow morning – USA vs. Canada for the gold medal if you missed that – we thought it might be an ideal time to unpack some of the things we saw, empty the notebooks, and have some larger discussion about things we did (and didn’t) learn during the NHL’s Olympic break.

Obviously this will have some Stars flavor, but the goal here is to have a larger conversation about the sport in general.

So, with that said, Robert, with just the gold medal game remaining, what have been your biggest takeaways or memories?