As someone from Canada and a fellow hockey player, most Canadian comments (removing the politics) are pleasantly surprised at the result. Realistically, Canadian spectators were expecting something closer to 0-15 or 0-20, so 0-8 is actually above expectations.
However its important to know that this was not the A team, or even B or C team the US fielded. Basically Canada and US are in this Olympics with their hands behind their backs because the NHL is not sending players, as Omicron has already battered the NHL season. Had an NHL level team been sent, there was no way China would have held America to single digits.
Russia actually has a good chance this time, mostly because as a result of the NHL decision, 2 top peers are knocked out as well as some Scandinavian powerhouses since the majority of thier top players are also in the NHL.
China's future in men's hockey however is actually quite promising (vs soccer), if the government decides to invest wisely. This is because China also has a Beijing team in Russia's Kontinental Hockey League, which is widely considered the second strongest hockey league in the world after the NHL. KHL has decent levels of funding and viewership, and includes other hockey powers like Latvia and Finland. If China can get a reasonable number of other teams (ie.4-5) established in the KHL, there would result a reasonable feeder system to get home-grown talent up to global levels.
The issue right now is that the majority of China's players are passport Canadians, which if you consider the low portion of Chinese Canadians in Canada who play hockey, means they are drawing half the team from a population of probably under 200,000 people. Funnelling domestic talent through Russia's KHL is an absolutely doable and safe olympic strategy. While overall teams in NHL are still much stronger than KHL, at the individual level there are NHL players who sometimes join the KHL and some top KHL players also end up in the NHL.
