Thats Alot of Scoring

   As I have stated before in this blog, in international sporting events scores have a bad habit if getting out of hand. Any give day of the year can easily prove this. Take February 16th for example, just in Ice Hockey, I have found four games betweeen the Olympics and the World Championships where scores got out of hand. I have also found 8 league games with the same type of results, half of them in the NHL. For today lets focus on the International contests.

   We start on February 16, 1947 at Prague, Czechoslovakia and the World Championships. The Swedish and the team from Belgium played one such game. The Swedes averaged eight goals per period and the team from Belgium only scored 1 in losing 24-1. The Swedes finished with a strong 9 goal third period. If things were not bad enough for the Belgium team, they were defeated five days later by the Czechoslovakians by a score of 24-0.     

   At the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, Norway, they had twice the fun. When the Switzerland-Finland game went into the third period with the Swiss leading 4-0, things were alot closer to being normal. Then the Swiss tripled their score in the final 20 minutes scoring 8 goals to finish off the Finns by a score of 12-0. The Swedes went into the second period of their game with the Poles with a slim 1-0 lead. A 9 goal second period went a long way towards a 17-1 win.  

   Not all the games had two countries facing each other. On February 16, 1959 in a Western Hockey League game at the Winnipeg Arena, the last place Winnipeg Warriors blasted the Edmonton Flyers by a score of 11-0.  

  If the team from Finland knew their history, they made sure that February 16, 1988 would not end the same way the day did 36 years earlier. They took out any frustations on the French beating them 10-0 at Winter Olympic games at Calgary. One never knows when the next game of this type will take place, my guess is it just might be at a hockey rink near you.

  Tomorrow we will look at some interesting events in Basketball history.