Moving On: Men's Ice Hockey Brackets for the Impatient

Because I don't think there's really much of a chance of any upsets, I'm going to take a slightly different look at the brackets: completely ignoring tomorrow's "qualifier" round. Yes, I know. It's glib and unfair. I can't help it. There's nothing for me to do with those games. I don't care what strategy Canada needs to employ to "bounce back" against Germany. So I'm moving past it, to the quarter-finals, where the fun begins. Wednesday. And it will be:

• Switzerland v. U.S. (12PM PT)
• Czech Republic v. Finland (4:30PM PT)
• Sweden v. Slovakia (7PM PT)
• Canada v. Russia (9PM PT)

(Game times are from the NBC site and are completely unreliable.)

The thing that jumps out at me about those match-ups: while it would be easy to make some educated guesses re outcome, each game really could go either way. Yeah, the favored teams probably will prevail in some, or even most, of the games, but in all of them? And in the case of the bottom two pairs, I don't think you can really say there's even a favorite.