The ‘problem’ with the World Cup of Hockey

Canada is too good at hockey, thus international hockey is uninteresting. So I read in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and right here in the National Post, after Canada’s not-so-whopping 3-1 victory over Victor Frankenstein’s Team Europe in Game One of the World Cup final. They finished off Europe Thursday night with a very tight 2-1 victory.

“Empty seats in the lower bowl, in big, unmistakable stretches, even as the game … hit the end of the first period,” James Mirtle observed in the Globe. Yes, he conceded, cobbling together a team of Europeans whose national teams were deemed unworthy of playing under their own flags will go down in history as a bad idea, even by NHL standards.

“But the biggest issue with international play isn’t the result of any shortcomings by the league,” Mirtle argued. “There needs to be a realistic chance of adversity … to create drama.”

“Maybe half the luxury boxes were empty, as were many rows of seats,” Bruce Arthur echoed in the Star. “The real problem with this World Cup, beyond some sodden play from several nations: Canada had been so good they made it boring.”

There is no question Canadian hockey is at a high point, and that traditional powers, notably the Czechs, have faded and don’t appear to be roaring back, and that other nations don’t appear ready to fill the gap. Perhaps that isn’t a recipe for the most compelling competition.

But that isn’t the “real” or the “biggest” problem with what went down Tuesday night. The real, biggest and I would suggest only problem was that nobody in the world cared about one of the two teams on the ice. For heaven’s sake, Rogers and CBC drew 3.1 million viewers for the thoroughly entertaining Canada-Russia semi-final. Any nation state in the tournament would have filled those seats and boxes for the final.

From the tournament organizers’ perspective, the “problem” is that Canada was playing a nonnation state. Full stop. The NHL and NHLPA created a ridiculous abomination of a tournament and — praise be to the hockey gods — it turned around and took a giant bite out their collective rear end.

Because hockey evinces no con- the United States to play together on one team,” Postmedia’s Michael Traikos conceded. “But if everyone thinks Canada is unbeatable, we might as well put it to the test.”

Honestly, the degree of overthinking here is almost unbelievable. I say stick to nation states and enjoy Canada’s dominance while it lasts. If Team Europe could give Canada a scare, which it certainly did in Game 2, then certainly the United States, Russia, Sweden or Finland is capable of the same. If you desire an international hockey tournament in which Canada very well might lose, there is an utterly compelling World Junior tournament every single year. Canada has only won one of the past seven.

But if we must tinker with the senior men’s game, I have a few proposals.

One: If there are only six teams good enough to play in the World Cup of Hockey, then only have six teams in the World Cup of Hockey. The precedent for this is not at all obscure — I refer you to all five fondly remembered Canada Cups.

Two: Some eyebrows were raised over the attendance figures in Toronto — a reported 11,604 for Sweden vs. Finland, for example. But there is probably no city in the world that could put 19,000 bums in seats for that game … unless that city happened to be in Sweden or Finland, of course. A tournament in which every game was a home game for one of the teams on the ice would certainly spice things up.

Three: If Canada only has one, two or three credible rivals, then let’s challenge them. As precedent, I refer you to the most famous hockey tournament in Canadian history. Why shouldn’t Canada and Russia or Canada and the United States go hammer and tongs at each other for eight games, four in each country? The worst that could happen is that Canada would win them all — or so I read in the paper.