Alex Ovechkin on Olympic quarterfinal loss to Finland: 'It sucks'

Few Russian players were willing to address a crushing 3-1 loss to Finland in Wednesday's Olympic quarterfinal, but Alex Ovechkin ventured forth to face the music on behalf of his teammates.

"It sucks. What more can I say?", Ovechkin said, via IIHF.com. "We had a good start, scored a power-play goal, and felt pretty good. But we made two mistakes. That's the game. We tried to tie but we couldn't score. Nothing. No emotion right now."

When asked by CBC's Elliotte Friedman why his team struggled to score in Sochi, Ovechkin said "that's a good question, it's tough. It's the second Olympic games that we lost that kind of game, and it's bad. Team fight and play until the end and nobody give up. We didn't score a second goal and it was hard."

He added he's not yet able to assess where this result ranks in terms of career disappointments. 

Russian head coach Zinetula Bilyaletdinov added this about his team's early exit:

It’s difficult to explain why we didn’t score especially the players who usually score on their teams like Alexander Ovechkin who scored over 40 goals. I cannot explain it. I apologize to the fans for our result. It was an unfortunate game for us. It’s an unpleasant situation. I cannot say anything bad about the players. They wanted to win so much but unfortunately there were some individual mistakes made and certainly we needed to score more.

Ovechkin failed to register a point but added three shots on goal in the defeat, finishing the tournament with one goal, one assist and a team-high 24 shots. As a team, the high-powered Russian attack managed only 12 goals in five games. 

The overall performance of Russia's forward core, however, wasn't nearly enough to help the team achieve their goal of winning gold on home ice. Rather, Russian hockey will have to live with a second straight Olympic quarterfinal exit for the next four years.