Canadian hockey in crisis? Get real
From Damien Cox’s blog, The Spin: Let’s start with the facts.
For two straight years, Russia has been better than Canada in the big junior game that mattered.
And the Russians have done it far from home. Give them credit. Big dollops of it. But not all losses are created equally. And before we go too far down that path, let’s remember the Canadian national junior team still has a chance to WIN a bronze medal.
Yes, yes, I know, only gold glitters in Canada when it comes to hockey. Blah, blah, blah . . .
This is not to say critical analysis of Canada’s wild 6-5 loss — that score! again! — to the Russians on Tuesday night is somehow unfair because these are teenagers playing for their country and don’t deserve anything but praise for being lovely Canadian boys as some would suggest. But any suggestion from the other extreme, that Canada was outclassed and embarrassed by Russia, would be equally misleading. That’s the difference the final 20 minutes made.
If not for that, we’d be looking at this Don Hay-coached group as one that behaved petulantly and all but ran itself out of the suddendeath semifinal contest. But fighting back almost all the way from a five-goal, third-period deficit while firing 56 shots at the opposing net is no reason for disgrace. It’s a helluva try.
Still, that’s three straight years of no gold. Do we have a crisis on our hands similar to 1998? Don’t make me laugh. . . .
A hockey system that has produced, in rapid succession, gifts to the game like Sidney Crosby, Steven Stamkos, Taylor Hall, Jeff Skinner and Ryan Nugent-hopkins has nothing to apologize for.
What was wrong back in ’98, so wrong that Canada called a national forum on the matter, was largely fixed by a re-emphasis on skill development. Go watch minor hockey. You’ll see amazing stuff.
Back then, we weren’t playing for bronze. We were losing to Kazakh- stan and letting the rest of the world do skill while we supplied goons, goalies and grinders. That has changed dramatically. So no crisis. No national inquiry. What happened on Tuesday was that a good Canadian junior national team — not a great one — had its vulnerabilities exposed . . .
Teenage talent is cyclical, even in talent-packed Canada, and the absence of high-end talent on this Canadian team — or its presence on NHL rosters — left this group a little short. Russia, meanwhile, may be at the peak of a cycle. It had enough to win gold at the world juniors last year, and this year has come with a team armed with two dynamic teenagers, Nail Yakupov and Mikhail Grigorenko, who could go 1-2 in next June’s NHL entry draft like Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin once did.
So next year in Ufa we may be talking about how good the Russians might be if Yakupov and Grigorenko weren’t playing in Columbus and Anaheim, or something like that.
But a country that won gold in the past decade with the likes of Jeff Glass, Justin Pogge and Dustin Tokarski in net can’t say that it has only recently hit a lull in the goaltending department. We’ve been covering up this vulnerable area for a little while now. Read more at thestar.com/cox