Posted on 02/23/2006 6:25:28 AM PST by Hat-Trick
Modano goal: whine, not win
TURIN - Old. Slow. Small. Team USA was all of that, even before it took the ice against Finland. Then as Peter Laviolette watched his once-great generation of American hockey players go about its sad business of losing an Olympic hockey quarterfinal, 4-3, the coach came up with his own adjective: Disinterested.
This was something he hadn't counted on, so Laviolette called timeout midway through the first period and screamed at his players that if they didn't find a modicum of passion out there, "We're done."
His face was flushed. His tongue was sharp. But on the anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, this was as close to Herb Brooks as Laviolette would get. His players didn't really pay much attention, until there were 12 minutes left in the game and the cause was fairly hopeless.
Laviolette tried a bunch of different players, benched some of the guys who pass as stars, and watched it all go down the drain. The Americans peppered the net in those final moments, and as usual couldn't score.
Then it was done, left to the participants to justify how it was possible for such a large nation with vast regions of frigid winters and fresh water lakes could go 1-4-1 in an Olympic tournament, beating only Kazakhstan and drawing with Latvia along the way.
It turns out, fortunately, that the Americans are very good at explaining failure, far better than they are at playing hockey. Laviolette persisted that the team didn't try hard enough all tournament long.
"We were standing instead of skating," he said. "We were on our heels and they were on their toes."
Mike Modano, assistant captain, said it was because the team didn't have a charter flight and the players' wives weren't taken care of properly. Believe it or not, he seemed to really mean it.
Then, as a final dart aimed at the coach who had just benched him, Modano suggested the Americans may have lost because Laviolette called his inspirational timeout.
"We could have used (the timeout) at the end of the game, give the guys some rest," Modano said. "A little composure, a little less panic. There was 50 minutes left in the game."
It wouldn't be Team USA if the Americans didn't exit with a complete absence of grace, and so Modano filled a very real need as team knucklehead. He said USA Hockey required change, top to bottom, that it was the bureaucrats' fault, and that the players had not really lost this tournament.
"I don't think we're far off at all," said Modano, who had a total of two goals and no assists in the tournament, with a minus-one rating. "The talent is there, the personality is there. The hockey part was OK. We played pretty good hockey."
This sort of self-delusion was just the ticket out of Turin, so that the Americans can now return to the NHL believing they were brilliant and merely sabotaged by travel agents and stand-on-your-head goaltenders.
If only everybody was honest about his own shortcomings, it would become difficult to assign such specific blame to an effort so terribly doomed from the start.
These Winter Games are a 'tweener. This generation of American players is too old now, too resentful. The next generation of juniors is too young.
If you are looking for historical precedent, then consider the U.S. national soccer team's World Cup disaster of 1998 in France, also pockmarked by bad performances and dissension from players who had seen their best days. Four years later, with the right coach and a new group of players, the U.S. made a serious World Cup run in Korea.
The same probably will happen for Team USA, which will surely be revived by Vancouver 2010. For hockey nations not quite as deep as Canada or Russia, down cycles are inevitable.
This was nobody's fault, really. Don Waddell, the general manager, didn't exactly have his pick of Peter Forsberg or Jaromir Jagr. Laviolette is the victim here, the guy who comes off unfairly as a failure.
The only real shame is that U.S. hockey players never know how to leave the building without sacking the joint, figuratively or literally. Modano went after U.S. Hockey yesterday, blamed officials for forcing him to buy his own airline tickets. Then he went after Laviolette, because the coach didn't play him down the stretch.
The players here became so fed up with losing, they forgot to try to win.
Batten down the dorm furniture. We'll always have Kazakhstan.
Originally published on February 23, 2006
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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