Tomorrow, Luca Sbisa figures to play his last competitive hockey game in a while.
Sbisa and Team Switzerland lost 2-0 to Sweden on Sunday at the IIHF World Championships in Slovakia. It was an all-around poor game for the Swiss, who couldn’t solve goalie Viktor Fasth and didn’t help themselves by taking a string of minor penalties – seven in all – that left them short-handed for 14 minutes.
Sbisa stayed out of the penalty box in 21:43 TOI, but was stuck with a minus-1 rating when Mikael Backlund scored into an empty net in the final minute.
Switzerland (0-1-1-2), now the fifth-place team in Group F, plays the third-place U.S. (2-0-1-1) tomorrow. By then, they will know the result of the game between fourth-place Norway (1-1-0-2) and sixth-place France (0-0-1-3). Norway has five points in the standings and Switzerland has three, but Norway beat Switzerland in the only head-to-head game between the teams. That would seem to preclude Switzerland from reaching fourth place (and thus the Quarterfinal Round), but according to the IIHF.com game recap, Switzerland still has a mathematical chance of advancing.
We’ll find out for sure tomorrow.
