Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Newbie]

Wow.

No Canada, no Czechs, no Russians. My pre-Olympic picks were all off.

Never would I have thought that these two would be meeting in the finals. Sweden, ok. I could see them making it. But Finland. Wow. Even as they went undefeated I figured they would surely be beat at some point.

I guess Canada can rest easy now and just brush these Olympics off as a fluke.

[VanIslander]

No fluke. Canada had a flawed approach to player selection.

And Finland is no big surprise.

At the World Cup '94, Team Finland wasn't expected to do much by many, were ranked 7th by polling in terms of likelihood to win the tourney. I thought that hogwash and predicted on HFBoards they'd lose to Canada in the final, and they did! A solid team.

In this Olympics Finland again was discounted, because of goaltending?? many didn't think about how deep Finns are in goaltending (a point repeated in The Hockey News about a dozen times over the last three years). They have the top line in international hockey: Lehtinen-Koivu-Selanne are known as the most consistently productive in international play over the last decade.

Plus Finland medalled twice in Olympic play in the nineties.

So why the big surprise?

Because of the all-star game mentality. Many think all you have to do is put together the top scorers, throw in one or two role players and you'll dominate a tourney. The fact is, you need to assemble a TEAM. That means guys who crash the net, screen shots, dig pucks out of corners, forecheck, block shots, hit, check, etc.

Canada was shutout in ten of its last twelve periods of play. That's no fluke. They were not a team, just an all-star game line-up. Lecavalier as the third line centre??? That doesn't work.

Finland, on the other hand, has dominated offensively and defensively by doing the fundamentals well, with feisty intense play at full tilt.

Finland demonstrates that hockey is a team sport.

I predicted that in this Olympics: Gold to the Czechs, Silver to Finland, Bronze to Russia... it almost happened too! (I have been wrong about much before, like Calgary and Tampa in every round of the 2004 NHL playoffs, but I've been "lucky" with international predictions, partly because I don't buy the mystique that an all-star roster translates into the best performance in a TEAM game. ANY NHL all-star team would get their butts whipped by a Stanley Cup champion team, even though the "talent" level is seen as so different (scoring talent, perhaps, but not all the little things that makes a team successful).

[Newbie]

THen how do you explain Canada winning the 02 Olympics with an All star team. Or the last World Cup with more or less the same team they had this year.

Good points about having a complete team, but a lot of the Canadian players are quite good two way players and on paper I liked the team. Good guys, but for some reason they just couldn't get it going. A fluke.

What Canada was really missing was Niedermayer. A quick moving defenceman that could add to the attack. Most of the time they were stuck with 3 attackers on 5.

[ulsanchris]

one player wouldn't have made a difference. Anyways i will be watching the gold medal game. I bet it will be a good one.