Canada Narrowly Advances on Penalty Shots

The puck squeezed past Sean Burke’s pads and dropped to the ice, rolling on its edge like a penny across a table. After an agonizingly long second, it toppled over and stopped barely an inch short of crossing the goal line. And because that shot by Germany’s Peter Draisaitl didn’t roll that extra inch, Canada advanced to the semifinals of the Olympic hockey tournament with a 4-3 victory here Tuesday.

Draisaitl’s effort was the second in the second round of tiebreaking penalty shots, a dramatic procedure that capped a plodding defensive game left unsettled after regulation and a scoreless 10-minute overtime.

Each team had converted two of five attempts in the first penalty-shot round when Eric Lindros--who had banged his first attempt off the glass behind the net--skated in from the red line and drew goalie Helmut De Raaf down, then slipped the puck into the net. That proved decisive when Draisaitl’s shot failed to cross the goal line.

“It’s better to just flip a coin,” German Coach Ludek Bukac said after his ninth-seeded team had narrowly missed upsetting the Group B winner. “Penalty shots are not a game situation. It’s not a good way to end this, but we have to accept it.”

Canada, which on Friday will meet the winner of today’s quarterfinal game between Sweden and Czechoslovakia, accepted the victory gratefully.

“ Relieved is the word,” said winger Wally Schreiber, who plays against De Raaf in the German League and had never scored on him until he flicked a wrist shot into the net in the penalty-shot round. “We’re happy to win, but not with the way we played. The longer the game went on and the closer they stayed, the more trouble we were in.”

Ken Dahl’s slap shot from the right point through a forest of bodies in front of the net gave Canada a 3-2 lead with 6:06 left in the third period, but Ernst Kopf tied it with 2:22 to go on a shot that bounced inside the left post.

Jason Woolley and Schreiber beat De Raaf in the first round of penalty shots; Michael Rumrich and Andreas Brockmann succeeded for Germany. Lindros then scored against De Raaf, and Draisaitl was stopped.

“I was thinking the net is this big,” Lindros said, holding his hands several feet apart, “and the puck was this big,” he added, bringing them within inches. “There had to be room.”