PRAGUE — The hockey-playing population of Austria is about 1.3 percent of what you’ll find in Canada, and through two periods of a group-stage meeting between those countries at the IIHF World Hockey Championship on Tuesday night, the odds of Austria winning the game were considerably longer than that.
Then something magical happened at O2 Arena.
Improbably, impossibly, Team Canada’s 6-1 lead completely evaporated into thin air over 16 frenzied minutes. The Austrians both earned and got bounces and started building some belief as the pucks sailed past Canadian goalie Jordan Binnington. Finally, they fittingly saw Marco Rossi, their lone NHLer at this tournament and a former No. 9 pick of the Minnesota Wild, tie the score 6-6 with 49 seconds to play when Kaiden Guhle mishandled a puck at the side of his own net.
Rossi made no mistake and tucked it under the bar.
“In 50 years, I will still look back to this moment,” Rossi told The Athletic. “I won’t forget this one, for sure.”
The enthusiasm of the Austrian team wasn’t dampened by the fact that Team Canada captain John Tavares secured a 7-6 win on the first shift of overtime.
Merely pushing such a top-tier opponent to that degree of discomfort, not to mention securing a standings point with the overtime loss, was something tangible. Head coach Roger Bader referred to it as a “special extra point” for a country trying to get through this tournament without being relegated to the “B” Pool for 2025.
“Nobody could imagine that we’d even win the last period,” Bader said. “Especially 5-0.”
According to the IIHF, it is the first time in tournament history that a team has come back to tie a game after trailing by five goals.
The Austrian roster is composed almost entirely of European-based pros, while Canada’s features established NHL stars, Stanley Cup champions and 20 players with more NHL pedigree than the 22-year-old Rossi boasts with his 103 career games.
Put it this way: When they flashed statistics on the scoreboard during the first intermission of Tuesday’s game that showed Austria with three successful zone entries and just 23 seconds of offensive zone time, compared with 16 entries and more than four minutes for Canada, it matched the eye test.
There was a sizable gap. At least until there wasn’t.
“The (smaller) countries are better than people think because they don’t know the names of the guys,” Canadian coach Andre Tourigny said. “They fight with a lot of passion. There’s a lot of emotion. And that’s what happened when they scored their second goal in the third (period). Then we became really emotional and we became nervous.”
For one period, at least, Austria flipped the script against the reigning world champions.
What made the frantic comeback even better was the massive amount of support they received inside the arena. Tavares likened it to being on the wrong side of a Stanley Cup playoff game in a partisan building.
“There was such a good atmosphere in the arena,” said Bader. “I felt like 40,000 were (pulling for us). It was a special moment.”
Even in a losing effort, some of the younger Austrian players were able to walk out of the building with hopes that it’s a sign of increasingly competitive games to come.
The country has started producing more top talents, with David Reinbacher selected No. 5 in last year’s draft by the Montreal Canadiens and Marco Kasper (No. 8, Detroit Red Wings) and Vinzenz Rohrer (No. 75, Montreal Canadiens) taken at the NHL draft in 2022.
Rossi’s 2020 draft class included countrymen Thimo Nickl (No. 104, Anaheim Ducks) and Benjamin Baumgartner (No. 161, New Jersey Devils), who also had a goal in Tuesday’s comeback.
“It was insane,” said Rossi. “We’ve never played overtime against Canada, so that’s a huge achievement for us. We can be really proud of ourselves.”
(Photo of Team Austria celebrating Marco Rossi’s goal: Andrea Branca / Getty Images)
