The world’s top hockey powers are sending their best teams to the World Cup.

All the biggest names in the sport. A best-on-best tournament.

By circumstances of birth, Anze Kopitar comes alone. Somewhat, anyway.

Kopitar is the lone Slovenian in the tournament. It is as if Slovenia said, “He is our best and, in fact, all we’ve got.”

Last week, players from eight European nations, none of them considered traditional “hockey powers,” met up in Quebec City and formed a temporary — and maybe never repeated — confederation: Team Europe. And to the surprise of few, Kopitar was named the captain of the squad.

It was a whirlwind end of summer for the 29-year-old from Jesenice. He was in Minsk over the Labour Day weekend, the lone NHL player on a Slovenian team that beat Belarus 3-2 in a shootout and thus qualified for the 2018 Olympic Games.

The next day he flew from Minsk to Frankfurt to Montreal and on to Quebec City. Upon arrival, he was informed that he had been named the captain of Team Europe, a first — and again, maybe never repeated — honour.

If Kopitar didn’t convey his excitement, put it down to a cautious nature, hockey’s codified dressing-room hierarchy and jet lag.

“There are a lot of guys in the room who could wear the C,” Kopitar says, sitting at his stall after his first practice. “It’s an honour to be the captain of any team but this one is even more of an honour. You’ve got players who have won Stanley Cups like Zdeno (Chara) and Marian (Hossa). There are guys here who are really respected veterans in the league, leaders on their teams. Most of us know each other—I’ve played against all these guys and I’ve met all of them off the ice. I think we can come together and I think we will.

“If we’re going to be successful then it’s going to be as a team and a group of leaders are going to help me out.”

Kopitar is careful not to come off as brash—nobody in the room was talking about shocking the world or running the table or knocking off Team Canada, the U.S. or Russia. And he pointed out that while the World Cup will be the first time he’ll be the designated leader of a team at the highest level of the game, it won’t be the last.

“[The Kings] gave me the C this summer,” he says. “I’ve worn the A before but I haven’t been the captain. I know what it takes … what you’re expected to do … but I haven’t done it before. I think those who make the decision [about the Kings’ captaincy] know me and saw something in me that makes them believe that I’m capable and ready to [be a leader].

“I’ve played there for 10 years. I had to be doing something right for them to make me captain.”

The C with L.A. is just an acknowledgement of a well-established fact: Drew Doughty may be the best defenceman in the game and Jonathan Quick the likeliest goalie to stonewall a team, but the Kings have taken their place in the league’s front ranks because of Kopitar’s emergence as one of the best centres in the league.

Last season he finished third in All-Star voting behind Sidney Crosby and Joe Thornton. Wayne Gretzky called him the league’s third-best player behind Crosby and Jonathan Toews. Crosby and Toews wear the C for their respective NHL clubs and Thornton did, too, until the wheels came off in San Jose a few seasons back.

Dustin Brown was the captain when the Kings won the Cup in 2012 and 2014 but Kopitar could have worn the same letter as the catalyst. And to an extent, that’s the designation that Team Europe’s management, general manager Miroslav Satan and coach Ralph Krueger, had in mind when they appointed Kopitar as captain for the World Cup. If their team is going to make a run, it will be on the broad back of the lone Slovenian on their roster.

Kopitar takes appropriate pride in Slovenia making the Olympic quarter-finals in Sochi in 2014 and qualifying for the 2018 Games.

“There was seven rinks and maybe 80 players in the country when I first played for Slovenia as a teenager,” he says. “There’s still seven rinks and not that many more players now.”

According to IIHF numbers, there are 117 registered players (excluding teenagers) in Slovenia. It’s a small country but no small feat for Slovenia to make the Olympics and stand No. 14 in the IIHF rankings. Still, Kopitar understands that the World Cup will be his best — and maybe only — chance to play for a team that knocks off one of the big six in the sport: Canada, United States, Russia, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic.

A world-leading player in a team sport without worthy talent surrounding him on his national side, Anze Kopitar’s situation is not quite without precedent.

For one glorious stretch in the mid 1990s, George Weah was the world’s best soccer player when he starred with Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan. And yet because of birthright, he had no shot at playing in the World Cup. Weah hailed from Liberia, a nation that had never competed for a place in the World Cup until Weah was in his teens. When Weah was approaching the peak of his powers, in the run-up to the 1994 World Cup, the Liberian team actually withdrew during qualifying rounds. And while its origins aren’t exactly easily traced, the Liberian national team’s nickname predated Weah but it seemed to anticipate him: the Lone Stars of Liberia.

Weah was the loneliest of the Lone Stars but not alone in the soccer history—others have ranked among the game’s greatest and had effectively no real shot at the World Cup.

Most notable among them was George Best back in the late 1960s, the Belfast-born star of Manchester United. Pele called Best “the greatest player in the world.” Best led United to a European Cup and had them in the hunt for league honours every season, but there was no one in Man U’s class on Best’s side on Northern Ireland’s roster. In fact, there was scarcely anyone who’d rank as a First or even Second Division player.

When Northern Ireland finally qualified for the World Cup without Best in 1982, the idea of inviting him to the big dance was kicked around by the team’s management.

Ultimately, though, Northern Ireland’s staff decided against it. Facts outweighed hope and sentiment—at age 35, Best was an alcoholic, five years had passed since he had represented his country internationally, and he was alternately playing for teams in the Hong Kong pro league and San Diego Earthquakes in the U.S. indoor league.

An elite hockey player without a chance to star on the game’s biggest international stages: Again, Kopitar isn’t quite the first to come along.

Back in the 1990s, Mariusz Czerkawski scored 30 or more goals in a couple of seasons with the New York Islanders and managed to log over 700 games with five NHL teams.

As a native of Poland, Czerkawski played five games in the 1992 Olympic Games, but during his prime the Poles were a fixture in the B pool.

It would have been a personal disappointment but unlike the cases of George Weah or George Best, Czerkawski’s absence at the big events didn’t quite qualify as the game’s loss.

If Kopitar were to have never made the Olympics, if he wasn’t skating in this tournament, it would seem unfair — in ways, somewhat less than the best-on-best event that it is.

There’s no doubt that international competitions factor into a player’s legacy.

Is Mario Lemieux something less if he didn’t score the overtime goal in 1987 or come out of retirement to display his sublime gifts in Salt Lake City?

Is Toews’ reputation still as strong without the shootout goals against the U.S. at the world juniors in 2007? Is Crosby in any way diminished if he flat-lined in Vancouver in 2010 and didn’t score the gold-medal goal in overtime?

You can mount a case that they wouldn’t be diminished as pure talents, but their performance on the big stages are, in fact, what first comes to mind when their names are mentioned.

For Anze Kopitar, international competitions were all he knew about the game.

“When I was a young guy there was no way of watching the NHL or even knowing much about the league,” Kopitar says. “My father got videotapes of the Russian team and so they became my favourites … the team that I cheered for [in international play]. It wasn’t the country or politics. It was the way they played the game, the speed and the skill they had.”

As a teenager, all of his highlights came in international play because of his home country’s limited opportunities for domestic competition.

“The first time I played in an international tournament was Olympic qualifying in Riga [Latvia] when I was 17,” he says. “My first world championships were the lockout year in Austria. All the big guys were there and I was in awe. I was trying to make it and just seeing those guys around was surreal.”

“I remember the first time I saw Anze play because it was against my son [in the German line-up] at the under-18s,” Krueger says. “Then there was a final between Germany and Slovenia in the second division of the under-20s to make it into the A pool in Bled in Slovenia. Anze had different coloured gloves, a light green colour. Anze dominated the game. It was amazing to watch.”

Ultimately, it was international hockey — albeit in the pools of the game’s minnows — that was Kopitar’s ticket to bigger things.

“Looking back, international hockey was my stage 15 years ago, a chance to showcase myself … to get a team interested in me like I got a team interested in me in Sweden. I’ve always looked at international tournaments as a springboard and I think kids like me [from the smaller hockey nations] look at it the same way. It’s a short tournament with games packed in. The scouts are there. The European team scouting is there too.”

Which is to say, it was an entirely different mindset than the approach Canadian kids might have when it comes to international play. While they were doing what they could to uphold the national honour and try to win gold, Kopitar went to under-18 and under-20 competitions to effectively circulate his resume.

“That’s how I wound up in Sodertalje [of the Swedish Hockey League],” he says. “That was so important to getting here.”

The first tournament game in the history of Team Europe will likely not live on in the history of the game.

In fact, it’s quite likely to have already become forgotten by the end of this World Cup. Just two full practices after Team Europe’s full complement arrived in Quebec City, Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel and the rest of the young North America squad routed the Europeans 4-0 in a pre-tournament matchup at Centre Videotron. Score one for youthful enthusiasm against the spirit of international spirit.

Kopitar’s place in the National Hockey League is established. Showcases are hardly necessary at this point. Still, at the summit of his career, he richly deserves a chance to skate on a big international stage.

Team Europe? Yes, it’s a confection generated to fill out the field at the World Cup, a chance that Anze Kopitar never thought he’d get to throw a scare at — or even beat — the hockey powers.

On that count alone, Team Europe stands as one of the most intriguing story lines in the tournament.