Mar 5, 2016
Thumbs up to World Cup, down to the selection process
TSN's Dave Hodge gives a thumbs up to the World Cup of Hockey as long as it doesn’t just make the international hockey calendar busier but thumbs down to only naming 16 players to each roster.
By Dave Hodge
The World Cup of Hockey is good enough to be interesting. Of that, there is no question.
But this requires an answer: Can it replace hockey at the Olympics?
The knee-jerk reaction is to say “no”, because while “World Cup” sounds big, nothing sounds bigger than “Olympics”.
The World Cup comes with a less than ideal schedule prior to the NHL season, but what it loses in the timing of the tournament it makes up in the start times of the games, guaranteed to be television-friendly because of the North American locales.
NHL fans aren’t wild about watching Olympic medals decided in the middle of the night, and IOC members don’t pay much attention to hockey when they’re figuring out their host cities.
The NHL will dump the Olympics at the drop of a puck if it thinks it can get away with it, and the NHL can do that if the players don’t care, or better still, if they come to prefer the World Cup.
That’s the time the fans will fully embrace the NHL owned-and-controlled event.
The comments of one Henrik Sedin suggest that time hasn’t come yet for the players.
Henrik makes the perfectly logical observation that international hockey tournaments and the long NHL season can’t continue to blanket the calendar.
Something has to give. If that’s the Olympics, the World Cup still doesn’t become the only international game in town. The IIHF World Championship is already the next thing to the Olympics outside North America. Fans in Canada and the United States can hope the World Cup will be regarded as hockey’s premier event, but those in Sweden, Finland, Russia, Czech Republic and all the countries that don’t get to enter World Cup teams may choose to differ.
So there’s a lot riding on the 2016 World Cup, and it makes for an interesting time for international hockey. “Thumbs up” if the World Cup makes it better and doesn’t just make it busier. That remains to be seen.
The World Cup has given us plenty to talk about, with 16 roster spots announced this week for each of the eight teams, and seven more to come on June 1.
And it’s not the first groups that dominate the conversation. Everybody wants to know who the remaining seven will be, especially on Team Canada, where the likes of P.K. Subban, Brent Burns, Corey Perry, Brad Marchand and their supporters wait to hear if they will be added.
Perhaps I shouldn’t complain, because the debates that ensue are already lively, but my thumb is down to this two-stage process.
It invites the word “snub” long before it should ever apply. Wait until June if you want real arguments, because Subban, Burns, Perry and Marchand could all be members of Team Canada, and if so, what was the fuss about?
If it was possible to select 16 players this week, it was possible to name all 23.
Do Team Canada officials really need to see more of Subban to decide if they want him on their blueline? There are reasons to pick Marchand and reasons not to take him, and those reasons aren’t going to change. Sixteen now and seven later caused Team Canada to pick Ryan Getzlaf and not Corey Perry, who got a phone call and an explanation. I’m guessing he’ll get another call in three months to tell him he’s on the team. He has a right to wonder why he doesn’t know now.