Just days after an overseas flight following the elimination of his Nashville Predators from the Stanley Cup playoffs, Swiss captain Roman Josi, in his second game of the World Championship came up with a huge performance. His minutes were limited in Switzerland’s first game – a 5-2 win over Norway. This game, however, Josi logged 27:47 of ice time – more than seven minutes higher than anybody else in the game – and contributed two goals and two assists to his team’s 6-5 win over Austria.
“I felt better, definitely,” Josi said about the jet lag. “The first game, I hadn’t played in a week, hadn’t skated much and moving to the big ice, it’s a little bit different, there’s more skating. Yesterday we had a practise too, today we were better in a lot of ways but we could still get better in other areas, so hopefully, we can get better and better as the tournament goes on.”
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The power play was where the Swiss really made hay in this game, going 5-for-6 while Austria was 1-for-3. Josi and Nico Hischier each had four points in the game – three each with the man advantage. Josi scored two 5-on-3 goals and drew the primary assist on two of Hischier’s three goals, including the game-winner with just 51 seconds remaining.
“It was obviously huge tonight,” Josi said of the power play. “I don’t even know how many we got but if you can get a couple on the power play, it’s huge for your game, and it was huge for us tonight. I thought on Friday, we struggled to find each other a little bit, we weren’t moving the puck as well, but tonight we did and ‘Hisch’ scored a massive goal at the end there.”
The Swiss outshot Austria 36-18 but David Kickert made some big saves in the Austrian net – including a massive glove stop off Philipp Kurashev in the last minute of the second period – while Reto Berra and Akira Schmid each had their struggles at the other end, combining to stop just 13. Schmid only allowed one goal in his period of work but it was a bad one, as Benjamin Baumgartner’s shot from the blue line went off his glove and in to make it 5-5 with 7:43 to go. He made up for it moments later, however, stopping Marco Rossi on a breakaway.
“They play hard. They’re a good team,” Josi said of the Austrians. “They’ve got some really good players over there and they forecheck hard. They don’t make it easy on you.”
Overall, Josi said, “It was intense. It was a lot of back-and-forth. I thought our start wasn’t the way we wanted but we knew we needed to show reaction in the second period and I thought we did. We scored some big power-play goals and even 5-on-5 I thought we played a lot better in the second and third. Obviously, it was a tight game but we ended up finding a way.”