Coaches and players on the U.S. men's ice hockey team were of a single mind Sunday after losing 2-1 to Sweden and dropping to 1-2-1 in the preliminary round of the Torino Olympics' tournament.

 

After losing to Slovakia by the same 2-1 score in the previous outing, defenseman Derian Hatcher summed up the thinking for everyone.

 

"We have to find a way to score and that's he bottom line," Hatcher said. "We're doing a lot of good things, but we have to find a way to put that puck in the net."

 

"We know we need to score more goals," forward Brian Gionta echoed."We want to score more goals and we know we need to."

 

From Hatcher to Gionta to coach Peter Laviolette the most disappointing part of the anemic scoring punch was wasting two 5-on-3 opportunities without a goal.

 

"You hate to see that," Hatcher continuied. "To not come out with a goal on either one of those is disappointing."

 

And the performance left Sweden in charge on two rebound goals that came off the pads of goalie Rick DiPietro.

 

But Laviolette was impressed by DiPietro as well as Sweden's Henrik Lundquist for making some tough saves in a tight defensdive struggle.

 

"Rick did a really good job for us," Laviolette said. "By far, it was the toughest outing for on of our goaltenders. The Swedish team is so skilled. They move to areas well. They create opportunities through space. It's tough to defense that. The game winner happened right off of a faceoff bang-bang.I thought he played an excellent game."

 

But even with the loss, the U.S. team is all but assured of advancing into the quarterfinals. It would take a tremendously one-sided loss to Russia in the next game to put the U. S. team out of the tournament. After the loss to Sweden the U.S. team's goals scored and goals againstg total stood at 9-8.

 

Laviolette went into more detail on the importance of solving the shortage of goals.

 

"We have players who I believe can score goals and we're creating scoring opportunities," Lavilette said. "I beleive we have the personnel in the locker room tos core goals. We believe we had the right people on the ice on the five on threes. What we didn't do was plut it in the back of the net. As the game ended we talked about maybe mixing it up and looking for something different.You do something different when you're not getting scoring opportunities. We have to get a little hungrier getting to the net, second chances, maybe get in front of the goaltender a little bit more."

 

But Laviolette seemed reluctant to tinker with his team.

 

"The Swedish team did a good job of checking and made it difficult to generate clean scoring opportunities. When we did generate clean opportunities, their goalie made big saves.