The Daily Faceoff Show: Marie-Philip Poulin’s golden performance as Captain Clutch

Team Canada is on top of the women’s hockey world once again.

Led by Marie-Philip Poulin, Canada defeated the United States by a score of 3-2 on Wednesday to capture gold in Beijing.

Frank Seravalli and Mike McKenna talked on Thursday’s edition of The Daily Faceoff Show about Poulin’s incredible accomplishments from gold-medal games and how women’s hockey needs to come together to capitalize on the momentum garnered from this tournament.

Seravalli: “Let’s talk about Captain Clutch, Marie-Philip Poulin.

The numbers are absolutely staggering when you look at them. She’s the only player, man or woman, in Olympic hockey history to score in four different gold medal games. She’s played in four of them and has seven goals scored. Seven of the last 10 goals that Team Canada has scored in an Olympic gold medal game belong to Marie-Philip Poulin.

I sent a message to Tyler, our daily bets guy, saying ‘hey, can you believe that Marie-Philip Poulin is plus-250 to get a goal this game? It’s automatic, you can set a clock to it. She’ll go down as one of the greatest ever to play, but she’s also one of the best hockey players on the planet.

Mike, when you talk about a takeaway from this, as Marie-Philip Poulin has cemented herself as a surefire Hockey Hall of Famer, I hope that this conversation can continue going. That’s really the takeaway from Beijing. You see the opportunity that women have gotten on the Olympic stage. People are paying attention, people are watching. We can’t go another four years before we’re having this conversation again.

In some way, the women’s game needs to come together and get out of their own way, in that they need one professional league moving forward to really put this sport on the map where it belongs in North America.”

McKenna: “They need a figurehead to make this happen and they need the dollars to go along with it. To me, it just depends on NHL teams buying in. I think that’s the way that they can do it, but the NHL doesn’t seem to have the appetite.

They want to say ‘hey, we love what the women can do, we love bringing the women to the skills competition at All-Star Weekend, we love showing off their ability.’ But you need that money. You need to start a league that’s going to be able to be self-sustaining. It needs to go in perpetuity so they can show off the product.

I want to watch Marie-Philip Poulin all day long. This is good hockey. It needs exposure and it needs the dollars to get it going.”

Seravalli: “I think the NHL is ready and willing to step in, Gary Bettman has hinted at that, but he’s not going to get in the middle of what’s clearly a tug-of-war between two different entities that are just warring factions. They need to come together as a sport for the betterment of the game in order to put it into a spotlight that we all know it deserves.”

You can watch the full episode here…