Canada is going in cold
Hockey fans under a certain age — 30, let’s say — won’t remember much, if anything, about the era when the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team was built without NHL players.
It last happened for Lillehammer in 1994, culminating with the one-handed Swedish Postage Stamp goal by Peter Forsberg in the gold-medal shootout against Canadian goalie Corey Hirsch.
That team, and the Canadian silver medallists from 1992 in Albertville, had some young players who were clearly bound for the National Hockey League.
The group heading to Pyeongchang has none of those (the youngest player is 25), although they do include a number who used to play in the NHL.
And you can pretty well lay the difference at the feet of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and the owners.
Their unanimous distaste for a mid-season break for an Olympics double-digit time zones away had been clear for some time, and although negotiations with the IIHF continued intermittently, it seemed obvious they wouldn’t be going to Pyeongchang.
But, by the time it was formally decided, it was too late for Hockey Canada to mount a “standing” Olympic team (with players living and training in the same city), which it had in the ramp-up months to every Winter Olympics after 1960, with the exception of 1972 and 1976, when Canadian hockey boycotted the Games over the issue of professionalism.
When Team Canada returned with a historically underrated team in 1980, there were 12 players in the roster who would eventually reach the NHL, including Hall of Famer, Glenn Anderson.
“We started in June, formed the team by September, played together for four months then around Christmas the team got split,” Anderson recalls for The Spectator.
“Half the team went to Tokyo for a tournament and half the team went to Moscow for their tournament,” he added.
“We came back in January together, trained for another three weeks together, and then to the Olympics
“If you watch Miracle on Ice, we beat the Americans the majority of times that whole year, eight times or so. That could have been us.”
A late sag against the Soviet Union and a terrible 100-foot goal allowed against the Finns made sure it wasn’t.
If Canada had been able to replicate the immeasurable opportunity its teams of 1964, ’68, ’80, ’84, ’88, ’92 and ’94 provided for rising young stars and, actually, NHL clubs themselves, the 2018 team would have had a much different look.
This team — and we’re not saying it can’t prevail next month against other NHL-shorted hockey nations — has never played completely together as a group, although chunks of it were together at various tournaments that were used to select the team from mostly European-based professionals.
The roster which had the most players who eventually made the 2018 team was at the Karjala Cup, when 17 of the 25 eventual selectees suited up.
That’s pretty good, but it was for only three games.
Because the 1994 Olympic team, and those before it, had a regular schedule of games (40-plus) beginning in late September against a variety of European and AHL clubs, plus the U.S. National Team, many of the core group had experience working together before the Games.
Admittedly, dozens of players (71 in 1993-94) dressed for at least one game, but when 19-year-old Paul Kariya joined the team from the University of Maine in December, joining Czech ex-Pat NHL holdout Petr Nedved to jolt the needle on the high-skill scale, the team began to jell far beyond its No. 10 world ranking.
Adrian Aucoin and a few others from the 1994 team used the Olympics and the high-calibre daily training — one of the biggest advantages of playing for a sequestered National team — to better equip themselves for NHL careers, as did youngsters before them like Eric Lindros, Joe Juneau, Trevor Kidd, Dave Tippett, Jason Wooley, Randy Gregg, Zarley Zalapski, Sean Burke, Russ Courtnall, Kevin Dineen, James Patrick and Kirk Muller.
Their eventual pro teams were much the better for it, and even in the far more youthful NHL of today, surely the more progressivethinking teams would prefer their top 19-and-20-year-old prospects to play five months under a sequestered Olympic program than in a junior hockey victory lap.
But that wasn’t an option this year, for the players, the NHL clubs nor, most hurtfully, Canada at the Olympics. So Hockey Canada made the best choice in selecting veteran, savvy players who now have experience on the larger ice surface.
It’s just too bad that was really the only choice. smilton@thespec.com 905-526-3268 | @miltonatthespec