This kind of stuff ticks me off. If we play amateurs on our team, we're screwed. If we play professionals on our team, we're screwed.
If we play amateurs it is at least fun to watch.
Not anymore. Now that players from behind the Iron Curtain are free to play in the National Hockey League, counties like Russia and the Czech Republic don't have the ability to send dominant professional teams to the Olympics anymore. I think U.S. and Canadian amateurs would actually do very well these days, since they already do quite well in the World Junior Championship tournaments every year.
1992 was the first Winter Olympics after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while 1998 was the first Winter Olympics in which NHL players were allowed to play. This means that 1992 (Albertville) and 1994 (Lillehammer) are really the only two Olympics that give a good indication of what a post-USSR, pre-NHL Olympic hockey tournament would look like.
And I would take the results of the 1992 Olympics with a grain of salt, too. That was the year there was no team from either the USSR or from Russia, but a unified Confederation of Independent States (CIS) team that included a bunch of former Soviet republics that now compete separately (Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Belarus, etc.). The CIS team won the gold in 1992, but the former Soviet republics were nowhere to be found on the medal podium in 1994. Sweden beat Canada for the gold in 1994, and Finland won the bronze.
Scandinavian hockey powers like Sweden and Finland actually have an advantage over other countries when it comes to international tournaments. Their laws that require two-year military commitments for all men make it impossible for their young players to sign in the NHL until they are 20 or 21 years old -- which is two years after the best players from other countries are already playing in North America.