Remember in 2010, when a bunch of columnists put on their best reasoning-with-a-kindergartner voices and informed us that Vancouver would not be a failure if Canada’s men’s hockey team failed to capture gold on home ice? And remember how we all stared at them blankly until they trailed off into silence? That’s pretty much the pressure weighing on Russia’s squad this time—only with the addition of a moderately frightening president who has invested in his country’s hockey fortunes like a child beauty pageant parent. He’s nurtured cozy links between sport, politics and business, and has a nearly adolescent desire for Russia to prove something to an international community that’s getting increasingly fed up with its antics.
But even if there’s a geyser of nationalistic pressure building under them, this roster should be up to the task. Team Russia will convene in Sochi with 10 Kontinental Hockey League players and 16 NHLers, including Alex Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Pavel Datsyuk and Alex Semin—an early snub that turned into a late injury replacement. The NHLers have the international name recognition, but the KHL players are at home on the larger ice surface, and their similar styles may give them the ability to meld as a team as quickly as this tournament demands.
The Russian game will be all about speed and ruthless precision. And with the KHL functioning as a belligerent upstart cousin to the NHL—as well as an infomercial for Russian sport and business prowess—it’s nearly as important for those players to put in a glittering performance as it is for Russia to take gold on home ice. One could argue that no one shoulders a greater burden of hopes and expectations than Ilya Kovalchuk.
Kovalchuk represents, in a sense, both faces of his country’s modern hockey identity—an incandescent Russian talent who lit up the NHL for 11 seasons, but then became the league’s highest-profile defector when he abruptly retired from the NHL and bolted for his homeland last summer. He dropped one of the few genuine bombshells in breaking hockey news when he announced he was walking away from the 12 years and $77 million remaining on his contract with New Jersey to join SKA St. Petersburg—he hadn’t been able to shake off the idea of going home since playing there during the lockout, he said.
At the beginning of his career, the Russian winger headed west when the Atlanta Thrashers snapped him up with the first overall pick of the 2001 draft. He went on to have five 40-goal seasons—two at the rare 50-goal level—during his NHL career. Kovalchuk left the NHL with precisely a point-per-game record over his 816 games, including 417 goals, and he’s continued to produce at a virtually identical pace in the KHL. His potent combination of sneaky speed, strength, puckhandling ability and sniper skills make him a prototypical Russian. And while Team Russia’s defence is its weak point, a roster’s worth of Kovalchuk types up front, winging around the big ice, passing and shooting like marksmen, will make life very difficult for opponents.
There’s little doubt that no country wants it more than Russia, with an urgency that makes Canada’s look amateur. After they finished sixth in Vancouver, Izvestia, one of the country’s biggest newspapers, ran a Q & A with head coach Vyacheslav Bykov with the (we hope) tongue-in-cheek headline, “Put the guillotine in the square and execute them all?” Let’s just say there will be no shortage of motivation for Kovalchuk and company.