MHH wrote:otyikondo wrote:
Says quite a lot for the current state of the NHL.
There are no NHL stars in other teams?
It says more about how difficult it is for big hockey nations with a lot of individual NHL stars to get their act together. People easily fool themselves into thinking like "adding together individual players NHL points sums up how good a team is" or like a team full of NHL stars has to be great. There are delicate factors like how those players will play together, some psychological factors (which can be tricky), etc. There are many examples of "star teams" which have failed miserably - it's like they'v got into some bad spiral. (One can also wonder, are there some "invicible workers" behind their regular team success, and those stars just collect the fame.)
Now, USA fell their boots on, as they managed to put on a tight fight at the end. Canada failed more, being unable to score in the last three games. But I can recall even more drastic examples, like "a Russian dream team" some years ago lost miserably all of their WC games at home tournament, even to B-class teams. Checs have also had their "nightmare tournament".
It would be more realistic for North Americans not to be so sure about their own superiority.
I take your point about "dream-teams", but...
My point, and I thought it would have been more obvious, is that these days the NHL is no different from the English Premiership, in that it is a league that depends very much indeed on foreign imports and the scoring/saving abilities of people from countries like Finland or Slovakia.
The parallel with the English situation is clear: Arsenal turned out the other night with a team that contained not ONE English player. The English Cup final played a few years ago between Chelsea and Middlesborough kicked off with 17 or 18 foreign-born players on the field.
The fact that Finland (pop. c. 5 million) can stuff both Canada and the United States, one of these being the mother country of hockey and the other being considerably larger and with a long, long tradition in the game, and the fact that Slovakia (pop. even smaller) can do the same (until they met the folks next door who put them in their place) suggests that
a) the sport over in North America is suffering from a weakening of the gene-pool after preferring to attract foreign stars
b) that for all the Americans' much-trumpeted "patriotism", they often do not gel as a team when representing their country.
Another slightly disturbing trend is that the malaise in b) above is starting to spread to other countries. Finland's difficulty in rounding up a goaltender is a case in point, as was the problems of the Russians a few years back. The big rich guys decided they'd rather play golf and protect their livelihood; getting injured playing for that delightful pine and lakes republic 4,000 miles away would not go down well with the employers and would hurt the players in the pocket.
The pattern is just the same in football: the European Champions League is now more important than representing one's country. Clubs try to "protect" their players - their prime resource - from national duties.
"The League", whether the ECL or the Bundesliga or the Premiership or La Liga, has become more important than the nation-state. Youn only have to look at the US teams that regularly turned out for the IIHF World Championships for this. Often they were college kids or farm-players.
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