Gary Hershorn / Reuters

Sweden's Maria Rooth celebrates in front of the U.S. bench after she scored the game-winning goal during the shootout to send Sweden to the gold medal game.  Mike Celizic says the blame for this loss should be directed toward USA Hockey.

Mike Celizic

Don’t lay this one on the overhyped expectations of the U.S. Olympic Committee. And don’t call it another failure of purported stars to come through in a big moment.

The U.S. Women’s hockey team’s shocking loss to Sweden in the semifinals of the Olympic tournament was due to one thing only: the mismanagement of USA Hockey.

In that way, this latest failure of a team that Americans expected to dominate was similar to the failure of the U.S. basketball team in the 2004 Athens Games. The first mistake was in the way the team was built.

When you come to the Olympics, you bring your best team. That simple dictum is so obvious it’s ridiculous that I have to even write it here. But it’s something that Ben Smith, the coach of the American team, and USA Hockey, which governs the sport and has supported Smith, didn’t do. They dropped the puck long before the opening faceoff of these blighted games.

The American players talked about how well they played in the 3-2 shootout loss to Sweden on Friday that for the first time in history will keep Team USA out of the Olympic gold-medal game or any other championship game. Some said they felt they dominated the Swedes, which they did — at least in shots on goal.

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“The better team doesn’t always win,” said forward Natalie Darwitz. “I think we were more dominant.”

That’s where Darwitz was wrong. They may have had the better players, but they weren’t the better team. The entire game and the final score proved that.

All through a long and hard-fought game, the Americans misfired on passes, fanned on shots and gave the puck up in the worst possible places. Three times U.S. defensemen threw clearing passes directly to Swedes bearing straight in on goalie Chanda Gunn.

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Gunn saved her teammates twice, but the third bad pass, by Lindsay Wall, ended up on the stick of Maria Rooth, who buried the goal that tied the game and set up a brilliant ending.

The Americans can call it bad luck, but luck didn’t have a lot to do with it. They’ve been getting shots at everyone throughout this tournament, but their problem is that when Smith and USA Hockey put together this team, they neglected to include anyone who could finish a play.

Cammi Granato cut
They had that person all along — Cammi Granato. Granato was the team captain, the face of the women’s game in the U.S. and around the world, the player who could finish a play and score the big goal, a proven winner.

But last August, Smith called Granato into his office and told her she was cut. Granato was furious at the time and remains so, and with good reason. Smith has insisted it was time for the team to get younger — Granato was 34, hardly ancient in hockey, but a fixture on the team since 1990. He told Granato she wasn’t a first-liner anymore.

This would be like telling Roger Clemens he’s too old to pitch in the World Baseball Classic because he can’t go nine innings anymore. You’d never do that in baseball. Smith did it in the Olympics.