One of my now favorite sports writers for the Washington Post, Tracee Hamilton, wrote a column today, Olympic hockey rules for overtime and shootouts,
This followed the dramatic eight round shoot-out, technically in International Hockey referred to as Game Winning Shots (GWS), where the U.S. beat Russia in a preliminary round game in hockey 3-2.
In International Hockey when a GWS situation occurs, it starts like the NHL with each team choosing three shooters who try one at a time to score a goal 1-on-1 with the goalie. If the score is tied after those three, in the NHL, they need to use a new skater each time. In International Hockey, they can use one of the first three players or a new one. In fact, you would expect the coach to use one of the original skaters since it was those three the coach thought most likely to score.
In today’s game the GWS score after three was 1-1. The Russian coach then alternated between Ilya Kovalchuk and Pavel Datsyuk, however the American coach used TJ Oshie every time. Oshie evidently happens to be one of the best shootout scorers in the NHL. Oshi scored a total of four times while the Russians collectively only scored three times so the US won.
In the column, Hamilton wrote that the rules covering Olympic Hockey required the shooters after the third round to come from the first three. In fact, as I mentioned above that was incorrect. I wrote her to let her know.
She then changed the column to make it correct and thanked “alert reader Dan and Katie Carrera for setting me straight”. I was alert reader Dan.
For the record, the first time I was quoted in the Washington Post was July 5, 2005, in an article by David Fahrenthold, In D.C., ‘W’ Spells More Than Baseball,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/04/AR2005070401219.html.
In the article I was quote as saying “My immediate reaction was, ‘W! Perfect!,’ ” said Dan Mintz, 57, of Bethesda. “Not only do I get to root for Washington, but I get to root for George.”
Amusingly when I was selected to be the CIO for the US Department of Transportation, the IT staff looked all through the web to find references to me. This one article was pretty much the only one they could find.