TORONTO – This was an idea several years in the making that left plenty of room for outside-the-box thinking.
And now that the rebooted World Cup has finally arrived, it is bound to be something.
What, exactly? No one can say yet with certainty.
But it’s big and it’s bold, and it’s here to stay.
This World Cup won’t be an outright replacement for the Olympic tournament, nor does it have to be. But for the world’s best hockey players, it still represents a fairly rare opportunity to wrap themselves in the flag and fight for international bragging rights that have basically been the exclusive property of Team Canada for a decade.
“This … I think we’re centre stage,” Canadian centre Jonathan Toews said this week. “It’s all about hockey right now, so I think that, for me, is the primary difference [from the Olympics]. This time around, we’re on home soil. There’ll be a lot of pressure. I think everyone’s talking about Canada trying to stay on top in that regard.
“We know there’s going to be a lot of challenges every single game and every single team we play to try to do that. It’ll be a lot of fun, it’ll be different.”
What will probably end up separating this event from those that came before is the level of unpredictability. There has never been a best-on-best tournament featuring eight teams capable of playing at this level.
When you couple that with the fact a couple are out for redemption – hello, Team USA and Team Russia! – you’re left with the perfect recipe for a compelling sporting spectacle.
The two experimental team offerings add yet another layer of the unknown.
Team North America created more buzz than anyone during the 11-day training camp period, and Team Europe – the biggest underdog here with a roster spanning eight countries – gets an opportunity to start legitimizing the concept in the tournament opener against Team USA on Saturday night.
That group has decided to embrace its perceived weakness. A collection of Danes and Swiss and Slovaks and Germans basically expect to be overlooked, and hope to take advantage of that fact during a tournament where only a win or two is needed to get past the preliminary round.
“At warp speed, things are going to happen … and everybody here in this room should expect the unexpected,” said Team Europe coach Ralph Krueger. “That’s what’s exciting, too, about this tournament, and we’re going to tap into being part of [the] unexpected.”
Who would have expected Team Europe to hammer Team Sweden, 6-2, in the final pre-tournament game earlier this week? Certainly not the Swedes, who had captain Henrik Sedin call a meeting of the team’s six-player leadership group afterwards.
The margin for error here is impossibly small.
And yet, the tournament arrives with Team Canada unanimously listed as the favourite to claim another title on home ice. Winning four of the last five best-on-best events – and eight of 12 overall – has restored a swagger to Canada’s national team.
Team USA forward Max Pacioretty referred to them as the “measuring stick.” Martin Rucinsky, the Czech GM, said that Canada boasts enough depth to send “four or five teams.”
Krueger spoke as if it might require an act of divine intervention just to get one game from the hosts, let alone the two it would require in a best-of-three final.
“It’ll take a magical day, it’ll take a world-class goaltending performance, it’ll take something very, very special in a group to be able to beat Canada here on this ice,” he said.
There are several with the motivation to do it.
Finland has been exerting itself more and more on the international scene and boasts some of the finest prospects it has ever produced. The Swedes, coming off a silver at the Sochi Olympics, are never to be overlooked.
The lone Russian victory in an event of this magnitude came at the 1981 Canada Cup when that country was competing as the Soviet Union. Alex Ovechkin and Co. were smoked by Team Canada in the quarter-finals at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and went out early once again on home ice in Sochi four years later.
Team USA, meanwhile, has been oh-so-close to a generation-defining victory.
Sidney Crosby’s golden goal in Vancouver left them with a bittersweet silver, and a 1-0 semi-final loss to Team Canada in Sochi felt like salt in an open wound. They’ve come here with a chip on their shoulders and a dream of repeating the country’s victory from the 1996 World Cup.
“We know it takes one game and one night to be considered the best team in the world,” said Pacioretty. “We know that on paper we’re not Canada, but we want to be a hard team to play against. Any team can win on any given night because there is enough talent on each team.”
Any question of whether the players would buy into this revitalized format was answered in the first pre-tournament game between Team USA and Team Canada – an incredibly spirited contest where they went toe-to-toe with one another.
It was also a reminder that no matter what these tournaments are called or where and when they’re held, the competitive spirit of elite athletes will shine through under the bright lights of the international stage.
“It’s really hard to describe what this feels like,” said Team USA GM Dean Lombardi. “I guess it goes back to the way I was brought up, and whether it’s your own goals and people you know have gone to Vietnam and know what those guys went through and what their reasons were, we don’t get a lot of opportunities to really do something for your country.
“I was raised under [former president John F.] Kennedy’s saying about ‘don’t ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ and this is really something that touches upon that.”
Here, the hockey world has arrived in arguably the most passionate hockey city on the planet.
What this ultimately means in the wider scope of history will be determined in time. But in the moment — in the here and now — this feels like something special.
“As far as a legacy or anything like that, you don’t really think about that,” said Crosby. “You just appreciate the opportunity to be here.”
