Nashville Predators Check-In at Winter Olympics: Juuse Saros stands tall for Finland

We're off and running in opening round group play for Men's Ice Hockey at the 2026 Winter Olympics with four Nashville Predators players competing for their respective nations.

Roman Josi is captain of Team Switzerland and has an assist, while Filip Forsberg has seen limited action for a very good Team Sweden who is 2-1-0 in group play.

Juuse Saros needed a bounce-back performance after his opening game of the Olympics, and delivered with a 34-save performance to hold Sweden to one goal and get the win. His Predators teammates and teammate on Team Finland, Erik Haula, tallied an assist in that 4-1 win over Sweden.

Later on Saturday, Finland will have their third game of the Olympics preliminary round and take on host nation Italy. We'll have to wait and see if Saros gets his third-consecutive start or if they try out one of their backup goalies in Kevin Lankinen or Joonas Korpisalo.

I can't imagine Finland goes away from Saros after his gem of a performance against Sweden in the previous game.

Roman Josi has one assist in the tournament in prominent role for Switzerland

Team Switzerland has a 4-0 win over Team France and a 5-1 loss to the heavily-favored Team Canada. Josi logged just over 20 minutes against France, and was used heavily against Canada with 26:44 of ice time and 30 shifts.

Switzerland is in a difficult group with Canada and Czechia, marking Sunday's clash between Switzerland and Czechia pivotal to see who finishes second place in Group A. So we'll be watching to see if Josi can lead his Switzerland team to a second-place finish in the group.

The best peforming second-place team among the three groups gets an automatic qualification to the quarterfinals, along with the three group winners.

Filip Forsberg has been used sparingly in first two games, but bounces back with an assist in his third game of the Olympics

Forsberg only saw one shift in Sweden's first game of the Olympics, which was a 5-2 win over Italy on Wednesday. On Friday, Sweden ran into a buzzsaw with Saros in net making 34 stops, and lost that game 4-1.

Forsberg saw a little bit more ice time in the second game, but still not much with just 9:31 of ice time and 13 shifts. In a game that Sweden struggled to find goal scoring, it was perplexing to see Forsberg used so little.

Then finally to open Saturday's action, Sweden moved to 2-1-0 in group play with a impressive 5-3 win over a gritty Slovakia team that features NHL players such as Simon Nemec, Juraj Slafkovsky and Erik Cernak.

Forsberg saw his ice time gradually increase again, this time to 11:45, 14 shifts and delivering an assist on an Elias Pettersson goal that put Sweden ahead 3-2 in the second period.

Sweden will now wait to see what happens in the Finland-Italy matchup. If Finland takes care of business in regulation to get the three points, then there will be a three-way tie in Group B. The goal differential tiebreaker might come into play due to each of these three teams beating up on each other. Sweden lost to Finland, Finland lost to Slovakia, Slovakia lost to Sweden.

Team USA Update

It appears that Team Canada and Team USA are on a collision course for the Gold Medal this year, but first thing's first; you have to take care of business in the preliminary round and Team USA passed their first test with a 5-1 win over Latvia.

Next up, Team USA will square off with Denmark later on Saturday, and then wrap up group play with a difficult test against Germany that shouldn't be taken lightly at all.

Denmark is looking for the massive upset over Team USA to take control of Group C. The winner will be in the driver's seat as both Germany and Latvia have already taken losses.

Team USA is loaded with depth and is being considered one of their best top-to-bottom rosters at the Olympics they've ever had with NHL superstars such as Matthew Tkachuk, Brady Tkachuck, Jack Eichel, Auston Matthews, Jack Hughes, Quinn Hughes and Connor Hellebuyck as their top goalie.