Rivalry Series 2025 Full Recap: Team USA Sweeps Canada; What Does This Mean for the Upcoming Milan Olympics?

Now that the Rivalry Series is complete for this year, let’s dig into how the games went! If you’re not familiar with the Rivalry Series, it is a series of games between Team USA and Team Canada that have been held every year since 2018. The number of games have differed from year to year, but the overall idea is to allow the teams to face off and to showcase the highest level of women’s hockey at varying locations in the United States and Canada.

Here’s how this year’s games turned out!

Games 1 & 2

Game 1: USA 4, Canada 1

Game 2: USA 6, Canada 1

Games 1 & 2 were held in November in Cleveland, Ohio and Buffalo, New York respectively. Team USA brought a roster that is likely to be largely the same as their Olympic roster, while Team Canada left some of their veteran players at home and allowed some younger players the opportunity to play instead. The games turned out how you might expect in that situation, with Team USA’s more experienced roster taking advantage of the missing Team Canada players and playing pretty dominant hockey.

In Game 1, Abby Murphy was the star, scoring a hat trick. Taylor Heise contributed in a big way, having assists on all 3 of Abby Murphy’s goals, as well as scoring a goal herself. It was also a special night for Laila Edwards, who got to play in front of a home crowd in Cleveland. Team Canada scored first in the game, but Team USA responded just 16 seconds after Canada’s goal, with Laila Edwards getting the assist, and Team USA didn’t look back after that.

In Game 2, it was Hilary Knight’s turn for a hat trick, and Laila Edwards netted a goal and 2 assists for a strong night as well. Taylor Heise got onto the scoresheet in this game as well, with one of the best assists you’ll ever see, setting up Buffalo native Hayley Scamurra to score a beautiful goal in front of her hometown crowd.

Games 3 & 4

Game 3: USA 10, Canada 4

Game 4: USA 4, Canada 1

Games 3 and 4 were both held in Edmonton, Alberta in December. Both Team USA and Team Canada brought rosters that looked a lot like the rosters they will likely bring to the Olympics. For Team USA, it was the same roster as they had in games 1 and 2, but Team Canada brought a number of veteran players that hadn’t played in games 1 and 2.

Game 3 was a decisive, and record-breaking, win for Team USA. This is the first time in program history that the Canadian senior women’s national team allowed 10 goals in a game. Canada had moments of getting close in this game, but USA then scored again to take away any momentum Canada tried to build. Standouts for USA in this game included Abby Murphy (2G, 2A), Kelly Pannek (2G, 1A), and Kendall Coyne Schofield (1G, 2 A). With 10 goals, much of Team USA’s roster had points in this one, and there were a lot of strong performances overall. This win also clinched the Rivalry Series for Team USA, winning the first 3 (out of 4 total) games. 

Game 4 was much more closely contested, and featured the kind of response game you would expect from Canada after an all around poor performance in game 3. There were a lot of disappointed and unhappy quotes out of the Team Canada locker room after game 3, and understandably so with how they performed. They played a much stronger in the final game of this Rivalry Series, and even though it still ended in a loss for Canada, they at least should have a few more positives to use a building blocks to help them in preparing for the Olympics. For Team USA, goalie Aerin Frankel brought her red-hot play to start the PWHL season into this game as well, with another strong performance. Hilary Knight scored 2 goals, and Taylor Heise tallied 2 more assists.

Takeaways

Team USA and Team Canada approached these Rivalry Series games with seemingly different strategies. Team Canada seemed to choose to rest some of their top players in the first two games, and allow some up and coming players a chance to play in the games, even if they might end up not being a part of the Olympic roster. On the other hand, Team USA brought more or less their intended Olympic roster to all 4 games, and seemed to treat the games as an opportunity to do some team-building, finding the right chemistry among players, and maybe just pre-Olympic preparations and bonding for the team.

These Olympics will be unique in that it will be the first one where the women’s hockey teams won’t centralize prior to the Olympics. In the past, these teams “centralized”, meaning they brought their players to camp months before the Olympics started, typically in early fall. It gave them time to make roster cuts and final roster decisions, and gave the teams a lot of time together to build chemistry on and off the ice, and to be more prepared as a team unit for the competition of the Olympics. With the PWHL, centralization is no longer an option, at least not for the players in the PWHL, so it will be interesting to see how the different strategies by Team USA and Team Canada might impact them at the Olympics. I still expect strong and impressive outings from both teams, so we might not see any significant impact from their decisions, but only time will tell.

For Team USA, having goalies Aerin Frankel and Gwyneth Philips should be a strength for an already strong team, with the only slight concern being that neither goalie has played in an Olympics before, but they have both proven to be at their best when the stakes were the highest in PWHL games and at other points in their careers, so I expect them to continue to be fantastic at the Olympics as well. This will also be Taylor Heise’s first Olympics, and she looks ready, with 9 points (1 G, 8 A) in the 4 Rivalry Series games. Team USA had plenty of scoring punch in these 4 games, and their speed and skill will bode well for them as well.

As much as these games are fun and important to the players involved, they aren’t close to the same intensity or emotion as a gold medal game at the Olympics, so as much as there are critics out there ready to count Canada out, it’s way too soon to do that, in my opinion. Team USA right now looks like the faster, more dynamic team, but there are adjustments that Team Canada can make before the Olympics, either with roster changes or system changes, to close the gap. Team Canada always seems to save their best hockey for the gold medal game at the Olympics. And since Marie-Philip Poulin earned her nickname “Captain Clutch” for all of her gold medal winning goals at the Olympics, as long as Team Canada finds its way back to the gold medal game (which, even with their recent play, would be shocking if they weren’t playing there), it would be foolish to count them out. It does feel more like Team USA’s Olympics to lose than any in recent history, but again, with the extra weight, expectations, and emotions of playing in the Olympics, you can almost throw out everything that has happened outside of those games. 

What we know for sure is that any and all matchups between USA and Canada at the Olympics will be exciting, close, and dramatic, and each team will bring its absolute best against one another, as they always do. More than anything, these Rivalry Series games just got me even more excited for the Olympics!