It wasn’t a contest; it was an optimization.

Canada’s 10-2 demolition of France at the World Championship felt less like a sport and more like a high-end server farm crunching a particularly easy set of numbers. It was efficient. It was ruthless. It was deeply, profoundly boring to watch. If you’ve ever sat through a software update that took three hours just to tell you it fixed "minor bugs," you know the vibe.

Here are three takeaways from a game that should have been an email.

1. The "Skill Gap" is just a hardware problem Watching the Canadian roster cycle through the offensive zone is like watching a fleet of Teslas navigate a parking lot—everything is sensor-driven, perfectly spaced, and eerie. There is no "soul" in a 10-2 win. There is only superior processing power. Canada’s fourth line earns more in a week than some of the French players see in a year. When you have that much of a budget delta, the outcome isn't a surprise; it’s a foregone conclusion.

France tried. They really did. But their defensive structure looked like a legacy OS trying to run a AAA game on integrated graphics. It stuttered. It lagged. Eventually, it just crashed. By the time the eighth goal slid past the French netminder, the game had ceased to be about hockey. It became an exercise in data collection. We learned that if you give a group of multimillionaires enough open ice, they will eventually find the back of the net. Riveting stuff.

2. The digital board ads are a visual migraine If you watched the game on a high-definition feed, you probably noticed the digital "ghosting" on the boards. For the uninitiated, those aren't real ads you see on the rink walls. They’re digitally overlaid by the broadcaster, often glitching when a player moves too fast.

It’s the ultimate metaphor for modern sports: the actual game is just a vehicle for the "Dynamic Brand Experience." There was a moment in the second period where a Canadian defenseman pinned a French forward against the boards, and for a split second, the player's head disappeared into a bright green logo for a crypto exchange.

We’ve reached a point where the tech is actively distracting from the product. I don’t care about the "Expected Goals" metric being pushed in the corner of my screen when I can’t even see the puck because a virtual banner for a sports betting app is refreshing its refresh rate. We’re paying $19.99 a month for "premium" streaming services just to have our retinas scorched by gambling prompts every thirty seconds. It’s a bad UX, and nobody in the front office seems to care as long as the checks clear.

3. Analytics have killed the blowout Back in the day, a 10-2 game had some heat. There was a bit of "grit." Now? It’s all about the "process." Canada didn't stop shooting because the "Expected Goals" models suggested that even at 8-2, the high-danger scoring chances were still worth pursuing for the sake of the tournament's tie-breaking math.

The sport has been sanded down by the same people who design middle-management spreadsheets. Every pass is calculated. Every shot is taken from a "high-probability" zone. It’s smart, sure. But it’s also sterile. France’s two goals were the only moments of genuine human error in the entire sixty minutes—a missed assignment, a weird bounce, a flash of actual, unoptimized chaos.

The rest of the game was just Canada running a script. It’s the same problem we see in Silicon Valley: when you optimize for efficiency above all else, you lose the "it" factor. You get a product that works perfectly and makes everyone want to stare at their phone instead of the screen.

The stadium was half-empty by the ten-minute mark of the third. Even the fans knew they were just watching a stress test. They’d paid eighty Euros for a ticket and another fifteen for a lukewarm beer that tasted like pennies, all to watch a simulation of a game they already knew the ending to.

If this is the future of "smart" sports—where the outcome is decided by the depth of your developmental budget and the speed of your tracking chips—what are we actually doing here?

Is a win still a win if it was mathematically impossible to lose?