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Four Nations

WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
Nothing weird about not believing in the relevance of a 6 game round robin tournament where Canada can win a gold medal by playing Belarus instead of Russia.
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This has never happened.

Again, the relevance is in it being a proper best on best tournament that the entire hockey playing world cares about. Large best on best tournaments have a clear and obvious track record at positively growing and popularizing sports internationally.
 
MindzEye said:
Re: 1998 though, I'm dead serious. Losing in 1998 was probably more important to the national psyche than winning would have been. We had been told for a few generations that we were unbeatable at the game. Canadian hockey was at the pinnacle and everyone else was playing for second. Endless re runs of Paul Henderson and Gretzky to Lemieux were proof of our greatness. To have Hasek deep dick us woke the country up to how much parity there already was at the top of the game and led to another golden generation.

As to why the olympics specifically are important, you're not growing the game with 4 team tournaments from traditional hockey nations. There's a reason why the NBA owners aren't falling all over themselves to make little insular tournaments they can cash in on.
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It isn't the NHL's job to grow the game internationally, especially at the expense of their own product during the NHL season. At least the Canada Cups were played during the off-season.

And don't be fooled by the Henderson replays. In the aftermath of that narrow victory, a forest's worth of trees were felled in order to print countless navel-gazing books about how Canadian hockey was in crisis. It became a cottage industry. We narrowly won in 72, the WHA team got caved by the Soviets in 74, and a team with Lafleur, Gretzky and Bossy got shit-pumped 8-1 in the 81 Canada Cup. The NHL all stars also lost badly to the Soviets in the 1979 Challenge Cup. In the second game of that one, the Soviets started their backup goalie Vladimir Myshkin, who promptly shut out the all stars 6-0.

So there was plenty of hand-wringing after 72 and it continued pretty much unabated from 1972 until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 
MindzEye said:
Same could have been said about basketball in 1990. Fast forward 30 years and the South fucking Sudan gave the USA a scare at the last olympics.

Yes, if you don't give a shit about growing the game, throwing the same 5-6 teams together for every tournament is all you need to know who is the best of the moment, sure. That's a good way for the game to atrophy and eventually die though.
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The NHL is not going to atrophy and die because they didn't do enough to grow the game in Botswana or Albania. And Olympic gold medals, based on the results of a round robin tournament where best doesn't always have to play best, don't count for much either.

When the Czech Republic won the gold medal, did anyone outside of Prague really believe that they were the best hockey nation on the globe? Of course not. Canada doesn't need to win Olympic medals to prove its hegemony and dominance in hockey. It simply "is". All it can ever do at such tournaments is lose. It can never really "win" anything.
 
WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
It isn't the NHL's job to grow the game internationally, especially at the expense of their own product during the NHL season. At least the Canada Cups were played during the off-season.
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It's not their "job" but it makes the product better in the end. Again, we have a very easy example to look at with the NBA and every one of us here just watched it happen in our life times. The NBA was an American dominated league, then something something dream team and a generation of best on best large format international tournaments and now the game is more popular than ever, more kids play it domestically and internatonally than ever, etc, etc.

Here in Canada, minor hockey participation is down 25% over the last 15 years, registrations in the US are flat after big increases (and that's only because female registration is waaaay up over the last 5 years), Swedish & Finnish registration is flat...and Russia went full nazi.
 
WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
It happened in 2002 at Salt Lake City when Quinn was the coach.

The US had to play Russia in the semis while Canada got to play Belarus. Canada never faced Russia in those games.
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But then we had to beat the Americans to win...we didn't win a gold medal because we beat Belarus. This is how tournaments work. We were in a group with Sweden and the Czechs ffs...and we played Belarus in the semis because they beat a hockey power to get there.

This is dumb, even for you.
 
MindzEye said:
It's not their "job" but it makes the product better in the end. Again, we have a very easy example to look at with the NBA and every one of us here just watched it happen in our life times. The NBA was an American dominated league, then something something dream team and a generation of best on best large format international tournaments and now the game is more popular than ever, more kids play it domestically and internatonally than ever, etc, etc.

Here in Canada, minor hockey participation is down 25% over the last 15 years, registrations in the US are flat after big increases (and that's only because female registration is waaaay up over the last 5 years), Swedish & Finnish registration is flat...and Russia went full nazi.
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Of you have a pro sports league based in the US, growing the game to the point where it becomes dominated by foreign players is the quickest way to lose fans.

American sports fans love sports at which Americans dominate. This is why the NFL is so massively ahead of the other sports. It is a game played virtually nowhere else in the world and almost all the players are American.

It's also why stock car racing is more popular in the US than F1 and why soccer will never be big here. It's why hockey will only ever be "sorta" popular.

Even baseball has become less popular in the US in part because so many players are now from Latin America and Asia.

Basketball has two major drawbacks to its popularity in the US. It's got more foreigners, and its always been too black for the tastes of many affluent fans. Obviously lack people love the NBA and hip hop culture helps sell it even among white kids. But the people who pay big money for courtside seats and luxury boxes at NBA games are white guys who are more into the Sammy Hagar version of Van Halen than Kendrick Lamar.
 
MindzEye said:
But then we had to beat the Americans to win...we didn't win a gold medal because we beat Belarus. This is how tournaments work. We were in a group with Sweden and the Czechs ffs...and we played Belarus in the semis because they beat a hockey power to get there.

This is dumb, even for you.
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We won the gold medal because we got to coast to an easy 7-1 win versus Belarus while the US had to bust their asses to beat Russia. Then we got to play a tapped out US team for an easy 5-2 win. We lost to Sweden, beat Germany by one goal and tied the Czechs. Canada was dogshit in 2002 but got favorable match-up's that the US didn't enjoy.
 
WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
Of you have a pro sports league based in the US, growing the game to the point where it becomes dominated by foreign players is the quickest way to lose fans.

American sports fans love sports at which Americans dominate. This is why the NFL is so massively ahead of the other sports. It is a game played virtually nowhere else in the world and almost all the players are American.

It's also why stock car racing is more popular in the US than F1 and why soccer will never be big here. It's why hockey will only ever be "sorta" popular.

Even baseball has become less popular in the US in part because so many players are now from Latin America and Asia.

Basketball has two major drawbacks to its popularity in the US. It's got more foreigners, and its always been too black for the tastes of many affluent fans. Obviously lack people love the NBA and hip hop culture helps sell it even among white kids. But the people who pay big money for courtside seats and luxury boxes at NBA games are white guys who are more into the Sammy Hagar version of Van Halen than Kendrick Lamar.
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Except the NBA is massively popular. It's gotten more popular as it's gotten more international, not the opposite. They just signed a 76 billion dollar media deal ffs.
 
WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
We won the gold medal because we got to coast to an easy 7-1 win versus Belarus while the US had to bust their asses to beat Russia. Then we got to play a tapped out US team for an easy 5-2 win. We lost to Sweden, beat Germany by one goal and tied the Czechs. Canada was dogshit in 2002 but got favorable match-up's that the US didn't enjoy.
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"a tapped out US team" because they played a game against the big bad physical Russians 2 days earlier.

This is a special, special take even by your standards.
 
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2yr AVG P1 & P / 60


McDavid 2.66 --- Matthews 2.58
Crosby 2.37 --- Nelson 2.06
Hagel 2.29 --- Guentzel 2.02

MacKinnon 2.62 --- Eichel 2.16
Marner 2.25 --- Tkachuk 2.02
Reinhart 2.07 --- Connor 1.90

Point 2.17 --- Miller 2.09
Konecny 1.93 --- Tkachuk 1.87
Stone 1.80 --- Boldy 1.85

Bennett 1.61 --- Trocheck 1.66
Jarvis 1.79 --- Hughes 1.83
Marchand 1.53 --- Larkin 1.73
Cirelli 1.33 --- Kreider 1.23


Duchene 2.05 --- Thompson 2.08
Seguin 2.37 --- Rust 2.13
Johnston 2.22 --- Caufield 2.08
​
 
zeke said:
yeah looks like.

So canada has picked pretty close to the best nerdie forwards at least.

Marchand with a +7 net rating stands out as the one guy who doesn't belong statistically, but his nerdies were there back when he was first picked, and i don't think anyone doesn't want him on the team.

There are a handful of other forwards who have the nerdies to be on the team but they're all flawed and i don't think anyone's crying that any of these guys missed - Monahan +17, Hyman +15, Tavares +14, Barzal +14, Scheifele +14, Dubois +12.

Of the goalies, Monty and Binnington both deserve it by the nerdies. But Hill doesn't. The nerdies think Thompson or Blackwood deserved to be there instead - and really, the nerdies think that all of Monty/Binnginton/Thompson/Blackwood are all legit good and all comparable so it probably doesn;'t matter which one of these 4 they use.

The defense is where it's more controversial. the nerdies think Bouchard and Harley should be shoo-ins. Personally, i think Bouchard is the biggest outlier nerdie player in hockey, slotted in the absolute perfect role to maximize his nerdies, and honestly I think he's a pretty shitty dman. Harley I like better. Parayko looks the most underserving nerdie-wise but at the same time he's a) pretty solid on the nerdies and b) arguably gets the toughest usage in all of hockey.

Overall Canada picked a pretty nerdy team tbh.
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Fuck Marchand
 
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