OilersFanatics505,
I'm Canadian myself, but trust me. Lots of people hate the way Canadian teams, players or media hype up their junior or NHL or global tournament team to the heavens like the entire country lives or dies by the sword that match.
If you want to see the most biased sports coverage on Earth, watch any TSN or Sportsnet telecast and it's hockey hockey hockey. And pro Canadian team all the time. Even for national broadcasts (which youd think would be balanced coverage), they only focus on the Canadian NHL teams. You could have some classic rivalry games on like NYR vs NYI, or Chicago vs Detroit etc..... but they'd rather focus on Ottawa Senators playing Nashville. It's a weird dynamic.
Turn on Sportsdesk or Sportscentral. You got some great games on that night like Knicks vs Celtics, big golf tournament going on, big trade in the MLB.... what is the first highlight of the night? Winnipeg Jets vs Columbus Blue Jackets.
BUT, you got to kind of understand that Canadian success in sports is heavily skewed to hockey, curling, a handful of pro basketball or baseball players, and noname people who win Olympic medals here or there. It's so lean, the male player of the year was a hammer throw guy nobody has heard of.
Other countries (especially the US), has so many more sports people follow, are competitive in tons of sports, and have tons of top players. So there's more sports action to follow.
So a lot of people and media cling onto hockey as the main sport were always competitive in. And when we lose, some people go ape shit sore loser because the better other players and countries get, the closer we are to losing being a dominant force. People can understand team Canada cant win 100% of the time, but they still want majority wins. They dont want it to drop to like 25% success rate because it looks bad. And the last thing they want is USA winning tons of global hockey tournaments or NHL spots because it'll become another case of Americans beat Canadians again.