Team USA too many men no call sparks Olympic final fury as Canada bench erupts
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Daniel Lucente
Feb 22, 2026 (10:46)
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Photo credit: James Lang-Imagn Images
Matt Boldy scores, Cale Makar answers, and a Team USA too many men no call turns Team Canada furious.
This Sunday at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic gold medal game, the whistle swallowed the story.
Canada and the United States sit 1-1 after the third, and every shift feels like a coin flip.
Boldy opened it early, Makar tied it late in the second, and Connor Hellebuyck has stared down a shooting gallery.
At one point, Canada held a 36-17 edge in shots, yet the margin on the scoreboard stayed razor thin.
Then the moment hit, a blatant too many men look for Team USA with 7:40 left in the third, and officials kept skating.
The Canadian bench reportedly erupted, and you could feel the whole building tense up.
That is the kind of non-call that haunts a country for decades, not a week.
It also lands right on the sport’s soft spot, bench minors are the easiest thing to count.
In a gold medal game, “easy” is supposed to stay easy.
Instead, Canada loses the chance at a man advantage, and the next sequence becomes chaos in front of Hellebuyck.
Cale Makar and Team Canada got robbed
Canadian fans are not just mad, they’re exhausted from watching “game management” pick winners.
If people are calling this the worst no call they’ve ever seen, it’s because the camera caught it clean.
The scary part is what it does to the next shift, players stop thinking hockey and start thinking refs.
Canada still has the legs and the zone time to win it on merit.
But now the finish comes with an asterisk-shaped cloud, and that sticks.
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