Every USA Olympic hockey team, ranked by miracles on ice

6.  Chamonix Olympics, 1924

1924 is technically the second time hockey took place at the Olympics, but as we learned earlier, the first time hockey happened at the Olympics was in the summer.

Even though this is recorded in the history books as the second time hockey took place at the Olympics, it is the first time hockey took place at the Winter Olympics. Are you still with me?

Winter. Summer. It didn’t matter for Team USA. They came away with silver once again.

The format used in the first Olympics (remember, that happened in the summer) was scrapped because everyone agreed it was stupid. In its place came a two-tier round robin system where the top two teams in each group got placed into a final group and then they played round robin style. This format was used until 1992 when the committee realized that it was also stupid. Since 1992, they’ve used the round robin followed by the tournament format that it used today. It’s a lot better.

As mentioned, Team USA took silver. If you paid attention to the 1920 Olympics, you noticed that every country was bad at hockey expect for Canada and America. Look at these scores:

19-0, 22-0, 11-0, 20-0

Those are the Team USA victories over Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Sweden. 

Team USA lost to Canada, 6-1, in what was essentially the gold medal game.

Even though hockey was a young sport, you have to give Team USA a lot of credit for scoring 72 goals in the tournament. They haven’t scored 72 goals in the last three combined Olympics. Maybe if they had a player as great as Herb Drury, they’d have won gold in 2010.