NHL commissioner says tournament will live on
Future format will be reviewed with NHLPA
Black-and-orange T-shirts with the crest of Team North America line the Air Canada Centre gift shop, while the patchwork Team Europe lines up on one side of the World Cup of Hockey final.
Both of the experimental teams were big successes in Toronto, but neither may exist when the next tournament rolls around.
Though the tournament will live on, the NHL and NHLPA have yet to decide what the event will look like down the line or even when it will occur.
“We will each take a deep breath,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said this week, “let our respective troops recover and will then debrief and get together and talk about what it is we think went well, what it is we think maybe we can do better, what it is maybe we should do different and start planning out the future.”
“The first time you do something there are always long lists of things you’d like to do better and hopefully you perfect it over time,” NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr said in a separate interview.
What the World Cup has not proven to be is a replacement for the Olympics, if that was ever even the hope.
Mike Babcock, the two-time gold medal-winning head coach for Canada, has long professed his belief that the World Cup could never replace the Olympics. Part of his thinking stems from the inclusion of concept teams like Europe, which remove the country-on-country tension of true best-on-best competitions.
The European squad even competed without an anthem because players said a tune created from scratch would offer nothing with regard to national pride. The opener of the final between Canada and Europe offered none of the usual intensity of an Olympic gold medal match.
While Babcock praised the World Cup earlier this week, he also said: “It’s not the Olympics. Let’s not get confused.”
Fehr said the World Cup was never thought of as a replacement for the Olympics.
“This is the ‘let’s go do the best thing ice hockey’s ever done on an international scale,’” he said.
Fehr also argued that the competition level was higher, on balance, than the Olympics.
Both the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association contend that the competitiveness was high in Toronto – perhaps the best ever – but while many of the games were close in score, the World Cup itself lacked tension. Canada entered as the overwhelming favourite and has proceeded to roll through everyone.
That may be a cyclical reality, though, with threats from Finland, the United States and Sweden all undergoing some kind of evolution.
North America was the top draw. Three of the four highestattended games thus far included the 23-and-under squad from Canada and the United States; a preliminary round tilt between the U.S. and Canada set the high-water mark at 19,106.