Posted on 02/23/2006 6:25:28 AM PST by Hat-Trick
44 year old Chris Chelios may have been the best player on the team..
Disagree. We more than hold our own with the best teams in the world. We won the silver medal in the 2002 Olympics and the Bronze medal in the 2004 world championships. The US is third overall in Olympic ice hockey medals. In the World under 20 world championships, the US won the gold medal in 2004 and in the under 18 world championships the gold medal in 2002 and 2005 and the sliver medal in 2004.
The percentage of U.S.-born players in the NHL is at its highest point in six seasons. Opening day rosters contained 113 players from the United States, comprising 15.5 percent of the 728 players in the league. That is the highest it has been since 16 percent of players came from the United States in the 1997-98 season. The quality and numbers of US-born hockey players are on the rise. We can compete with the best.
Yah I like the Finns for the gold this year too.
His age was thoroughly exposed in the game against Slovakia over the weekend. It's one thing for a guy his age to be out-skated by younger, faster players . . . but against Slovakia he got pushed around a lot by guys who were about 5'10" tall and weighed 185 pounds.
You must be getting 2002 confused with 1998. Team USA won the silver medal at Salt Lake City in 2002, losing (inevitably, I might add) to Canada in the finals.
Mike Modano has been a pretty boy since he played here in Minnesota. It has always been all about him.
This was the least talented American team since 1980, in my opinion, by a wide margin. At least in 1984 we had Pat LaFontaine on the team.
Chris Chelios was too old four years ago in Salt Lake. Derian Hatcher is the textbook definition of a "sled". Heck, they could have put Phil Kessel on this team so it would have one player with breakaway speed.
But then, given Team Disappointment's showing all across the Olympics, it's not terribly surprising.
Your comments about Modano are a riot. Modano has and always will be a puss and a me me me guy. No one else wanted an old Modano that's why he is still in Dallas.
As long as the Europeans don't send their NHL'ers, I'd like to see it.
The real problem is that the U.S. has something of a "missing" generation of hockey players in the 20-30 age group. The players over 30 were great in their prime, but not anymore. And the current crop of collegiate players and Under-18 players looks very good, but in between the youngsters and the old-timers there simply isn't a lot of U.S. talent.
The U.S. couldn't score when given the chances, and they were out-hustled. No U.S. or Canada in the medals this year; good for international hockey, I guess, but embarassing (not as bad as Nagano, but still bad).
If they'd played the entire tournament with the intensity of yesterday's final period against the Finns, they'd have won the Gold.
My first guess is either Gretz or Super Mario, but knowing your love for the NJ Devils, it's probably Scott Stevens.
The one advantage you'll have with teams like Sweden and Finland is that they'll have some younger players who have NHL-caliber talent but will be playing on their national teams while they fulfill their mandatory military commitments. This is what happened with guys like Mats Sundin and Peter Forsberg (and Teemu Selanne, I think) -- who were NHL-ready at the age of 18 but didn't sign with NHL teams until they were 20 or 21 years old.
I think a lot of the NHLers see a foreign Olympics largely as a working vacation. This is why you get the big "upsets" by the teams that still have lots of non-NHLers (those being guys that can push the NHLers to stop thinking of it as a vacation). Coming at this point in the NHL schedule, when the fatigue usually starts getting to guys anyway, I think it's pretty hard for a team made up entirely of NHLers to go to Italy and serious think of anything more complex than nice restaurants and the hotel jacuzzi. I think this they did so much better in 02 than 98 and 06, nobody really thinks of Salt Lake City as a great vacation spot, especially not with all the good ski slopes occupied by the game. And with the 2010 games being in an NHL city I expect them to be more focused on the game there (certainly nobody from the Western Conference will mistake the games for a vacation).
What Olympics were you watching? The US allowed only 13 goals during the five games of the preliminary round compared to Sweden's 12 and Russia's 11. It was our inability to score, which was the problem.
Chelios surprised me too.
But Brian Leetch should have been out there.
Yep. Sorry 1998.
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