Just as it did four years ago in Nagano, the Olympic hockey tournament once again beggared
the NHL regular season and playoffs for import, drama, and skill. But that's the way it's supposed
to be, after all. Why shouldn't a quadrennial clash of national teams supersede the workaday
grind of a pro league's season? The same is true in soccer, where the World Cup is the jewel
crowning every other title, and we see again that hockey is no different.
That's Lesson 1 from the Olympic tournament just completed, that a short tourney pitting the
world's best, playing for their countries, is the most fascinating, dramatic conceivable form of the
game. A simple lesson, really, but let's see if the NHL learns it. Our guess: they will, and
Bettman will give the green light for league participation for Torino 2006 -- but only after he
withholds it as a bargaining chip in the upcoming contract talks with the NHLPA.
What are the other lessons taught by Salt Lake 2002? Behold:
Lesson 2: Consistent refereeing makes up for everything. The officiating at the Olympics
was remarkably consistent, remarkably controversy-free, and a pleasure to watch. That's what
happens when games are called by the book -- a hook is a hook, a hold is a hold, a trip is a trip,
no matter when and where and by whose agency it occurs. Very soon the players understood
how the games were being called, and very soon they laid off all the cheap, chippy, clutchy-
grabby stuff that mars North American games.
Lesson 2a: It was often NHL refs making the calls, and they had no problem adhering to
IIHF standards rather than NHL standards -- which should tell you who the culprit really is
the next time someone starts complaining about bad officiating in the NHL.
Lesson 2b: The Olympic refereeing was consistent and comprehensive -- and there was only
one ref on the ice! Who needs two refs to congest the NHL's already small and overcrowded
rinks? One ref, calling it by the book, is plenty -- and you gain a little more room for the players
to use their skills, too.
Lesson 3: The IIHF must get its officiating assignments in order. As excellent as the Olympic
reffing was (at least in the men's tournament), the IIHF learned the hard way that it's important to
avoid even the appearance of partiality. So when there's a match between Canada and the US,
for god's sake don't assign an American ref to call the game, as happened in the women's final.
(Imagine the uproar if the Americans had won!) Same was true for the men's final. (Imagine
the uproar had McCreary done anything less than an impeccable job.) Pick a ref from a nation
not playing in the game. Seems like the simplest thing in the world, yet the IIHF consistently
failed to understand that most basic of tenets. Uh-duh.
Lesson 4: Want to stop the rash of concussions in the NHL? Adopt the IIHF's no-hits-to-
the-head rule. That's the rule in Europe: you can't hit a guy in the head. If you do, you're
immediately whistled off. Would we in North America really miss so much by being deprived of
the spectacle of someone smashing his shoulder into someone else's jaw, and then seeing that
unfortunate lying insensate on the ice for a good 10 minutes? We think not.
Lesson 5: Two-line passes? Worth a try. The jury's still out on whether two-line passes
ought to be allowed in the North American pros, but can you believe all the knee-jerk naysaying
we're hearing about it from NHL types? "Less skilled players would turn it into an icing fest!"
"Imagine what a coach like Jacques Lemaire would do! There'd be so much neutral-zone
trapping!" "The defencemen would be afraid to come up to the opposing blue line! There'd be
no sustained attacks!" Blah, blah, blah. First off, your typical NHL game already has way too
much icing, way too much trapping, and defencemen who don't know what to do half the time.
Second, did we see evidence of these feared outcomes in the Olympics? No! What we saw
was the occasional long breakout pass, the occasional icing, and most of the rest of the time, no
discernible difference. For all those afraid of the two-line pass, all we'll do is trot out Exhibit A:
The Canadian women's goal at the end of the second period, the one that won them the gold
medal -- the result of a gorgeous, exciting, two-line pass as time was expiring.
Lesson 6: Adopt automatic icing. This one is so self-evident as to not even require an
explanation. Watch the NHL GM's blow it off anyway.
Lesson 7: Do this again -- on the club level. We contend that the champion European
club team could give the Stanley Cup champion a real contest. We'd love to see, say, two games
on European ice under Euro rules, and two games on North American ice under NHL rules.
Colorado Avalanche vs. Mettalurg Magnitogorsk -- two in Denver, two in Magnitogorsk or
wherever the Russian club want to host it. -- JZK
Not everybody gets a gold medal, but we'd like to give out some gold stars. Our choices for Olympic All-Star honours:Gretzky photo by Joe Bryksa, Winnipeg Free PressWe'll recognise Canada's Pat Quinn as All-Star coach, too, for reshaping on the fly what began as a crew of overagressive, unfocussed NHL glitterati and turning out a cohesive, gold-medal-worthy team. Quinn was gracious in victory as well. Germany's Hans Zach gets second-team status for preparing his AHL-quality roster to play scary smart, and for providing some of the best quotes of the tournament. -- JZK / KER / SIR
Wrathful archangel?
Snarling cacodaemon?
You make the call.
Whether any professionals should participate in the Olympics or whether the Games should somehow remain the realm of amateurs is a whole separate debate. However, the admittance of pros being a given, the argument, such as it was, before this Olympiad, was whether the NHL should "disrupt its schedule" by participating. The following article from European Hockey.Net and the IIHF site, which even THN actually quoted in part, sums it up perfectly and should be required reading for anyone who questions the value of NHL participation in the Olympics...Reluctance to embrace Olympics will only hurt NHL In its policy towards the upcoming Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the National Hockey League is [making] the same mistake... former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev [made] when he tried to implement "perestroika" and "glasnost" some 15 years ago. Gorbachev thought he would reach his objectives by giving the people a little of everything, a little of communism, a little of capitalism, and a little freedom. The result was a bit of a mess. The debate in North American sports media since the hockey season started shows, when one can read between the lines, that the NHL has the same kind of ambivalent feelings towards what should be the biggest show in hockey history. The league wants to be a big part of the show, but not too much. It wants the Olympics to be perceived as something great, but not too great. At least not to the point where it overshadows the NHL All Star game. The NHL has paid serious money in order to have its logotype integrated with the Salt Lake 2002 logo. Almost every official NHL publication it boasts the Olympic "Hockey Rules" slogan. But when Slovak, German and Latvian players beg to be released for the preliminary round of the Olympic tournament, instead of telling the team GM's: "Let them go," the league commissioner looks the other way. The NHL loves to poach on Olympic ideals, but when a half-injured player declines All-Star Game participation in order to be fully fit for the Olympics, a high-ranked NHL official threatens with a fine. The NHL's basic problem stems from the fact that North American team sports are not used to international competition. And when faced with it, the league executives simply don't know how to handle the conflict. The reasons are obvious. The two most popular team sports in North America are baseball and American football, two sports which never have known international competition and that is why the winners of those leagues are called "World Champions" despite the fact that the world doesn't take part. This, of course, has had an historical influence on North American hockey where the Stanley Cup champions earlier also were labelled as "World Champions" despite the fact that the competition was exclusively North American. The absence of international dimension in North American team sports has suddenly emerged as a huge dilemma for the NHL in a year when the Olympics have totally overshadowed the league's regular season. The problem is clearly defined in a very interesting article posted on the NHL.com some time ago. The headline reads: "Club or country?" Writer Rich Libero correctly describes North American sport fans as being "a little too caught up in regional matters." The conclusion of the story is very predictable. Libero writes that, as far as the NHL is concerned, "...club will always take precedence over country." This is a North American, if not a purely an American, problem. For Europeans, who are familiar with international competition since the beginning of the century, a question like "club or country" would never even be raised because it is totally irrelevant. If it were raised anyway, the answer would be: "Both!" First you try to win your national championship with your club and then, providing you are good enough, you can try to win an Olympic medal with the national team. In Canada, people discovered the beauty of international competition in September 1972. That was the first time in the history of that country that the whole nation was behind one team. When Canadians, at the turn of the Millennium, were asked to vote for "Canada's team of the century" the fans didn't select the great Montreal Canadiens teams of the '50s or the '70s or the Toronto Maple Leaf teams of the '60s. They voted for a team that all in all played only eight games, the 1972 Team Canada. The biggest single sports happening in Canada's national history was not a Stanley Cup winning goal, but Paul Henderson's winner in the 1972 series with 34 seconds left of Game 8 against the Soviets. Stanley Cup goals come and go, but every Canadian who is old enough remembers to the very inch where he or she stood when Henderson scored. This portrays the very essence of the NHL's Olympic dilemma. The league, with 24 out of 30 teams based in the USA, is nowadays a USA-run operation with its head offices in New York. Despite splendid victories in the Olympics in both 1960 and 1980 and in the 1996 World Cup of Hockey, USA has never enjoyed a situation where Americans were united behind their hockey team. The NHL has never had an experience that demonstrated to the league executives that great international competition does not take anything away from a domestic league. On the contrary, it makes the domestic league stronger. What is good for hockey is good for the NHL and for all other domestic leagues. There has never been, and will never be, a contradiction between club and country in sports. If "club" is the smoked meat sandwich, then "country" is the dill pickle, coleslaw and the mustard, which makes the sandwich perfect. Instead of seeing international hockey and the Olympics as a threat, the NHL should try to benefit from the huge potential of hockey's international dimension, something that baseball and American football never will have. NHL's biggest business problem is the lack of basic hockey interest in the USA. Just look at the dismal TV ratings in the USA during the playoffs. The reason is simple. A New York Rangers fan is foremost a Rangers fan, and a hockey fan secondly. This case is the same in almost all American NHL cities, unlike the situation in Canada. When a Stanley Cup final is played between Detroit and Colorado, fans in other American cities really don't care to watch it because their team is not in it anymore. The NHL could try to put an end this parochialism by promoting the sport of ice hockey and increase the general level of hockey knowledge. And there is nothing that captures the imagination of sports fans more than a high quality international tournament where everybody (even the Slovaks, Latvians and Germans) takes part. While listening to NHL officials or some North American based journalists, they try, in a subtle way, to get the message across that the Stanley Cup will always be bigger than the Olympics. Mr. Libero agrees: "At the end of the day, all North American players will choose winning the Stanley Cup over an Olympic gold medal 100 times out of 100." This is something that Mr. Libero of course must say as the Vice President of Content and Production of NHL.com, but he makes the basic mistake of comparing a domestic league with international competition. The answer is of course that players would like to win both. The problem with a statement like that is that the question is irrelevant to 90 out of those randomly picked 100 NHLers. For them it's not an issue because they would never be in a position to play for Olympic gold. Several former NHL players, great ones and less great ones, have this season expressed their views regarding the Olympics and international hockey in general. In an Edmonton Sun interview, former NHL superstars Bobby Orr and Mike Bossy said that not participating in an Olympic tournament is the only thing they regret from their careers. Bossy said that he holds the memories of four Stanley Cup wins in high regard with the Canada Cups further down the list, but he added: "It would have been a lot of different if it would have been the Olympics." Reed Larson, an NHL journeyman in the '70s and '80s, said this in a recent Calgary Sun interview regarding his participation on Team USA in the Canada Cup: "It was the best hockey I've ever seen and the best hockey that's ever been played." Joe Thornton, the emerging superstar centre in Boston, was quoted as saying this the other day to the London Free Press: "I'd play fourth-line wing on the Olympic team if they asked. I'd go as waterboy." Just like the World Cup soccer is superior to any of the national leagues, the Olympics are, without a doubt, of higher quality than any other domestic league. And this is obvious to any serious observer. Club teams are stocked with players whose talents vary a lot, while Olympic teams are all-star teams. It takes so much more talent and skill to win an Olympic gold medal than a league championship. Take, as an example, Team Canada at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano. Had they been a club team, they would have, in all likelihood, swept the Stanley Cup playoffs in 16 straight games. But they were not good enough to win a medal at the Olympics. So, the best advice which can be given to the NHL is: show generosity, open up, embrace the whole tournament and not only the games where USA and Canada play, let everybody who is qualified join in and the game of hockey will be the winner. So also will the NHL. -- Szymon Szemberg
A veritable scoring frenzy in the NHL's January games boosted the league's 2001-02
goals per game average up to a sizzling... um, 5.16. That's still the lowest mark since 1955-56.
If your adrenaline's still pumping from the Olympics, a few NHL games should put you right back
to sleep.
More positive publicity for the game came from that bastion of credible journalism,
The Weekly World News -- the quintessential supermarket check-out tabloid on which TV's
"The Chronicle" is based, still specializing in reports on BatBoy, Elvis, UFO sightings, and
11-foot cockroaches, while all the others have retired to mere celebrity gossip. All its stories
are true, of course, merely hyped up, if occasionally into unrecognizability, for maximum shock
value, which we realised several years ago when they covered a rather sensational murder in our
hometown and really had nothing in their lurid, exclamation-point-smattered version of the story
that wasn't a fact. Anyway, the February 12 issue ("Salt Lake Shocker! 3-LEGGED SKATER
BANNED!") also featured one other utterly unbelievable cover headline: "Hockey Players are
America's Smartest Athletes!" Nice picture of a gap-toothed Bobby Hull next to the hed.
-- KER / SIR
Just as we've almost caught up on our various updates, links, and awards after this winter's personal and technical setbacks, our Forum and counter server gets hacked and goes out of commission as March arrives. Bad timing, as the Forum has really been buzzing lately, but fear not: internet tech-provider giant BraveNet is not about to be laid low for long. Our Forum should be back up and running, messages intact, by the time most of you read this. -- SIR
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