The U.S. women’s hockey team’s dominance over Canada highlighted action in Olympic sports over the weekend.
Abbey Murphy and Hilary Knight recorded hat tricks as the U.S. beat Canada 4-1 on Thursday in Cleveland and then 6-1 on Saturday in Buffalo in the first two of the rivals’ four pre-Olympic meetings this fall.
The U.S., which lost the 2022 Olympic final to Canada, has now won four consecutive games against Canada, including the World Championship final last April that went to overtime.
The U.S. benefited last week from home ice and from the absences of a few of Canada’s stars, including forwards Brianne Jenner, the 2022 Olympic MVP, and Sarah Nurse, the leading points scorer at the 2022 Olympics, plus Ann-Renée Desbiens, its No. 1 goalie each of the last five years. All three still could be key players at the Olympics.
The U.S. also had several players from the NCAA who were game sharp, while Canada had more PWHL players whose seasons don’t start until later this month.
Still, the Americans’ attacking depth was impressive. Knight, the most successful U.S. Olympic hockey player in history with one gold and three silver medals, is showing no signs of slowing down at age 36. She plans to make Milan Cortina her final Games, becoming the first American woman or man to play in five Olympic hockey tournaments.
Murphy leads NCAA Division I in goals and penalty minutes since the start of last season for the University of Minnesota. She has risen within the national team since she was the youngest forward on the 2022 Olympic roster at age 19.
Taylor Heise, fueled from missing the 2022 Olympic team to become 2022 World Championship MVP, recorded four points on Thursday and then on Saturday had a no-look, behind-the-back assist.
Laila Edwards, the first Black woman to play for the senior national team and the 2024 World Championship MVP, had four points between last week’s two games. That’s after having moved from forward to defense a year ago due to the team’s glut of scoring talent.
The U.S. and Canada, which combined to win all seven Olympic women’s hockey titles, meet for the last two times before Milan Cortina on Dec. 10 and 13 in Edmonton.
In figure skating, three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto was the star of the fourth of six Grand Prix Series regular season stops at NHK Trophy in Japan. Sakamoto won her home event with the world’s best score this season, a total that no other senior woman has beaten in international competition in this Olympic cycle.
Sakamoto won world titles in 2022, 2023 and 2024, then took silver at last March’s World Championships in Boston behind Alysa Liu. The top American women compete the next two weeks – Liu at Saatva Skate America, then two-time U.S. champion Amber Glenn at Grand Prix Finland. If both perform well, they’ll likely join Sakamoto and others in the six-skater Grand Prix Final from Dec. 4-6 in Nagoya, Japan, in a potential Olympic preview.
Yuma Kagiyama won the NHK Trophy men’s event with his best total score since January. Kagiyama, the 2022 Olympic silver medalist, competes next week in Finland, where he can clinch a spot in the Grand Prix Final to face two-time world champion Ilia Malinin for the first time in this Grand Prix season. Malinin outscored Kagiyama in their last seven head-to-head competitions.
Fellow Japanese standout Shun Sato was just 1.53 points behind Kagiyama at NHK, qualifying for the Final and extending his strong early season.
In ice dance, Maia Shibutani and Alex Shibutani placed sixth in their first event in nearly eight years — since winning dance and team bronze medals at the 2018 Olympics.
The siblings ranked third out of the three U.S. dance couples at NHK and rank eighth among American couples by best total score over the season thus far. Three U.S. dance couples will be named to the Olympic team after the national championships in January, taking into account skaters’ bodies of work over the previous year.
The Shibutanis are entered in next week’s Grand Prix in Finland.
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