USA's coach rips referees for deciding “a huge part of the game”

In case you missed it yesterday, Team Canada managed to sneak its way past Team USA by a score of 6-2 in their semi-final matchup at the World Junior Championships.

The thing is... that score was actually much closer and the game was played much tighter than the final score would make you think. The Americans came on strong early and held a comfortable two goal lead. Canada would ultimately storm back to score six unanswered goals, but the real story is the fact that the Americans had two goals reversed on video replay for goaltender interference at critical points of the game.

With Canada leading 3-2 in the 2nd period the Americans appeared to tie things up before Canada's head coach Dennis Williams challenged the play for goaltender interference. Upon review, the goal was reversed in a pretty controversial decision.

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Five minutes later and Canada would double their lead to 4-2. That's when things get realllllllly interesting.

Early in the 3rd period the Americans looked to pull within a goal to make things 4-3, but again had a call turned back on goaltender interference. This time, the call was pretty black and white to me. This is clearly goalie interference:

You can't harpoon the goalie like that... that's no goal in any league in any game. There really shouldn't be any saltiness about this overturned goal, the first one though... I dunno... could have gone either way.

After the game all the talk has been about the two reversed goals and how the officials effectively took the Americans out of the game. American head coach Rand Pecknold wasn't happy with the way things played out and he voiced his displeasure with the officials in his post-game comments.

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Basically: "No comment, but here are my exact thoughts on how things played out."

Sounds to me like Pecknold was expecting some sort of make-up call from the refs and he's upset that he never got it. My advice: Play hard and play by the rules. Good things tend to happen when you don't have to count on the refs for your good and bad breaks.