With two of its best players out injured and a 17-year old goaltender making his World Junior Championship debut, the United States lost 6-3 to Sweden on Wednesday night at Grand Casino Arena.

A loud, announced crowd of 18,618 saw the Americans finish second in Group A pool play at 3-1, while Sweden won the group at 4-0.

The U.S. plays either Finland or Czechia, whichever winds up as Group B’s third-place team, in a 5 p.m. quarterfinal Friday at Grand Casino Arena. A loss would eliminate the hosts, who have won the last two WJC titles. The Americans beat the Swedes for the 2024 WJC crown.

“It’s never fun to lose when you have that many people supporting you,” said USA winger and Woodbury product Will Zellers, who scored his fifth goal of the tournament. “I feel we shot ourselves in the foot at times with some unlucky turnovers against a team that’s going to produce with little to no space.

“This changes our mindset a little bit because it’s do or die now. We have to flush it and learn from it.”

After older goaltenders Nick Kempf and Caleb Heil split time during previous games, Team USA coach Bob Motzko on Wednesday turned to Brady Knowling, a Boston University commit and projected NHL first-round draft pick, who was added to the American roster two weeks ago. The Chicago resident stopped 23 shots and didn’t shine, but his teammates also played spotty defense and committed too many turnovers.

“We’d made the decision to get him in at some point and tonight was the night,” Motzko said. “We don’t fault him for the mistakes we made against a team with an enormous amount of talent.”

Minnesota-Duluth forward Max Plante and Boston University defenseman Cole Hutson were out hurt; the latter, considered by some as the tournament’s best rearguard, for a second consecutive game. Both are WJC veterans and, while Motzko said Plante isn’t likely to return soon, he said a Hutson appearance in the quarterfinals looks likely.

Team USA had several prime scoring chances during the opening 12 minutes but surrendered the first period’s lone goal on an unfortunate deflection. Casper Juustovaara’s attempted cross-crease pass towards an open Milton Gastrin at the right post instead deflected off the skate of American defenseman Logan Hensler and past Knowling.

“They come on us right from the beginning and a couple of our players have never been in this kind of building and with this kind of crowd,” said Swedish coach Magnus Havelid, whose team returned three players from last year’s competition. “We were lucky when we got the first goal, and it gave us confidence and we grew to have a very good second period.”

Sweden pushed its lead to 3-0 during the second period’s first six minutes. Eddie Genborg beat Knowling from the bottom of the left circle on a power play set up by a goaltender interference call on Ryker Lee. Three minutes later, an onrushing Lucas Pettersson ripped a shot from the right circle and inside the far post.

The U.S. brought the building alive with a man-advantage tally of its own three minutes later. Defenseman Chase Reid, whose WJC performance thus far could boost him near the top of the 2026 NHL draft, skated in through the right circle to put home a rebound after Swedish goaltender Love Harenstam made a stellar save while on the seat of his pants.

The potential American comeback gained steam when Harenstam was whistled for diving after a collision with Zellers atop his crease. Instead, a glaring U.S. giveaway at its offensive blue line led to another Swedish rush, a shorthanded goal for Pettersson and a 4-1 lead with seven minutes remaining in the second.

The Swedes went up 5-1 with another power-play strike before the U.S pulled within 5-2 with five minutes remaining in the middle stanza. Zellers put in the rebound of a Brodie Ziemer shot off a wide left rush.

Kempf relieved Knowling for the third.

Team USA’s L.J. Mooney soon passed off the left wall to Teddy Stiga in the low slot, from where he deflected in the feed to make the score 5-3 early in the third.

Anger swirled through the arena when American defenseman Luke Osburn was penalized for delay of game after chipping the puck over the glass in his own zone. Osburn was clearly boarded by an unpenalized Genborg a split second later, and when A.J. Spellacy was soon after sent off for a high hit that Pettersson seemed to embellish, the crowd booed lustily.

By the time NHL prospect Ivar Stenberg popped in a rebound that Kempf dropped in the crease during Sweden’s 5-on-3 power play, resignation had set in.

“We want to dump pucks in and see the other team’s (back) numbers,” Zellers said when asked what aspect of the U.S. game most needs to be stressed. “Getting them behind their defense, and finishing our hits and wearing them down. But we have to back check and make sure they don’t get those odd-man rushes.

“It ramps up our intensity, knowing it’s do or die now. The last thing we want is not to win the gold. That’s our only goal. This loss motivates us a little more and it’s fuel to our fire.”

Motzko said earlier in the tournament that he wasn’t insistent his team win its group so much as it enter the knockout round playing its best. The Americans don’t appear to have quite reached that goal but a bigger one looms ahead.

“We fumbled the ball and they ran it in the end zone,” Motzko said. “But our play, especially at the start of the game was how we want to play. We have to (forget), because now the tournament truly starts.”

Briefly

Sweden has won two gold medals, 12 silver and seven bronze since the World Juniors officially debuted in 1977. The U.S. clocks in at 7-2-7… The tournament’s last-place team is relegated to the world junior “B” pool for next year’s tournament, while Norway, winner of that level this year, has earned promotion to the “A” pool.

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Videos released by St. Paul police Wednesday show a driver running from a stolen vehicle and turning toward officers with what prosecutors say was a loaded gun.

Two officers fired their duty weapons and injured the man in the leg.

Elliot Samuels Vaughn, 32, of Minneapolis, was treated at the hospital after the Dec. 21 incident and is now jailed. The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office charged him with first-degree assault, saying he attempted to use deadly force against two St. Paul officers by pointing the gun at them.

The police department released excerpts from a squad camera and the officers’ body-worn cameras on Wednesday, which has been the St. Paul department’s practice in recent years in instances when officers shoot someone.

“We are committed to releasing BWC (body-worn camera) and other video as soon as possible, while ensuring we don’t negatively affect the independent investigation or those impacted,” Police Chief Axel Henry said in a statement. “Thanks to our community and the BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) for supporting this process so we can provide the transparency and accountability we always strive for.”

The squad video shows officers driving after the stolen vehicle on the ramp to westbound Interstate 94 from U.S. 52.

After a rental car company found a Buick Envista had been stolen from its parking garage in Minneapolis, General Motors was able to electronically track the Buick and notified officers it was being driven in St. Paul. GM remotely slowed and stopped the Buick at 3:18 p.m.

Seconds after the driver opened the vehicle door and started running, with the squad following, the driver turned toward the squad with an object in his hand.

Officer Byron Treangen III, who was in the squad’s passenger seat, fired through the windshield, his body-camera video shows. The driver, officer Matthew Foy, stepped out of the squad and started shooting. Multiple shots were fired by police.

Vaughn fell down on the road. He was treated at a hospital for the gunshot wound to his leg.

The BCA is investigating the officers’ use of force.

In addition to assault, Vaughn is charged with motor vehicle theft. His attorney had no comment Wednesday on the charges against him.

A 37-year-old woman from Blaine, who was said to be the passenger who ran from the vehicle, was charged with drug possession.

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No sooner had John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter died of leukemia at age 35, than President Trump got busy dusting off previous social media posts to cast shade at her bereaved family.

Though he didn’t mention the late Tatiana Schlossberg by name or reference her death, Trump harvested screenshots of his supporters’ posts belittling the famous family after his newly handpicked board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to tack the president’s name onto the venue.

The Kennedy family announced Schlossberg’s death on Tuesday from a rare form of leukemia with the simple message, “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts.”

Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, addresses an audience during the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award ceremony, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Oct. 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

Schlossberg had written poignantly about her diagnosis and treatment in The New Yorker in November, a powerful account of a year-long journey that paralleled her cousin Robert Kennedy Jr.’s attack on the nation’s public health system as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

As condolences poured in, Trump, reportedly miffed at the raft of performance cancellations in the wake of the board’s Dec. 18 name change, pulled supporters’ social media posts out of mothballs and onto Truth Social. He re-upped such gems as, “The Kennedy Family have LONG neglected the Kennedy Center, btw. They don’t raise money for it. They never show up. And the only Kennedy who has been there recently is a member of Trump’s cabinet,” and, “The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys.”

New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The Kennedys themselves were especially vocal during the public backlash against the institution’s name change, given that Congress had dedicated it as a living memorial to JFK after the president’s 1963 assassination.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and others led the excoriation charge against Trump’s posts.

“In the early afternoon, ET, the Kennedy family announced that JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg had died from cancer,” the anchor wrote on X. “A few hours later, President Trump re-posted some social media garbage attacking the Kennedy family.”

Barely a month earlier, Trump had blamed movie director Rob Reiner for his own murder.

“On a day when the Kennedy family is grappling with an unimaginable personal loss, Donald Trump chose to use his platform to launch petty, vindictive attacks against them,” Meidas Touch wrote on X. “Yet another stunning display of cruelty and utter lack of basic human decency.”

With News Wire Services

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday that the Constitution remains a sturdy pillar for the country, a message that comes after a tumultuous year in the nation’s judicial system with pivotal Supreme Court decisions on the horizon.

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Roberts said the nation’s founding documents remain “firm and unshaken,” a reference to a century-old quote from President Calvin Coolidge. “True then; true now,” Roberts wrote in his annual letter to the judiciary.

The letter comes after a year in which legal scholars and Democrats raised fears of a possible constitutional crisis as Republican President Donald Trump’s supporters pushed back against rulings that slowed his far-reaching conservative agenda.

Roberts weighed in at one point in March, issuing a rare rebuke after Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who had ruled against him in a case over the deportation of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members.

The chief justice’s Wednesday letter was largely focused on the nation’s history, including an early 19th-century case establishing the principle that Congress shouldn’t remove judges over contentious rulings.

He also called on judges to “continue to decide the cases before us according to our oath, doing equal right to the poor and to the rich, and performing all of our duties faithfully and impartially under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

While the Trump administration faced pushback in the lower courts, it has scored a series of some two dozen wins on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. The court’s conservative majority has allowed Trump to move ahead for now with banning transgender people from the military, clawing back billions of dollars of congressionally approved federal spending, moving aggressively on immigration and firing the Senate-confirmed leaders of independent federal agencies.

The court also handed Trump a few defeats over the last year, including in his push to deploy the National Guard to U.S. cities.

Other pivotal issues are ahead for the high court in 2026, including arguments over Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship and a ruling on whether he can unilaterally impose tariffs on hundreds of countries.

Roberts’ letter contained few references to those issues. It opened with a history of the seminal 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” written by Thomas Paine, a “recent immigrant to Britain’s North American colonies,” and closed with Coolidge’s encouragement to “turn for solace” to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence “amid all the welter of partisan politics.”