With the 20th Olympic Winter Games now completed I’ve been thinking about the men’s ice hockey tournment in Torino. Personally, I think that it was a great tournament (Canada’s loss notwithstanding) on it’s own terms. My concern was with the way it was co-ordinated with the professional hockey season. Fitting the NHL season into the time before and after the Olympics seems to have really cramped things up. As well, some teams seemed to have a lot of marquee players involved.
Given the nature of both, I don’t see any effective way to prevent conflict between the two as presently organized. However, I think it could be organized a little bit differently and still be very good. I really enjoyed the World Cup of Hockey in 2004 and I think it was a fairly successful event. That got me to thinking about how the ice hockey events differ from comparable events in the world of football (soccer).
The FIFA organization has always ensured that the World Cup and the Olympics do not compete for status even though both are quadrennial events; the World Cup has always been the marquee event. Over the years the Olympic tournament has taken many different guises (not unlike Olympic ice hockey), but recently they’ve established it as an under 23 tournament. And, that really makes a lot of sense to me. It creates a marquee type event that stands between junior level tournaments but doesn’t really compete with the World Cup (not that anything really can).
I would really love to see the NHL/NHLPA and the IIHF come up with something similar for the Olympics and the World Cup of Hockey. That is, the World Cup of Hockey should be established as a long term quadrennial event (offset from the Olympiad) with a straightforward qualification system. And, the Olympic tournament should be limited to younger players. My knowledge of player ages is not sharp enough to decide on that limit, but it could probably be anywhere from 23-25.
This would allow the World Cup of Hockey to be organized in the off season, and feature all the best professional players each participating nation has to offer. And, it would allow for a great Olympic tournament that wouldn’t necessarily involve shutting down the entire NHL for the duration (maybe a short breaks and some games short a few players per team).
Obviously, none of this is my decision to make (and maybe it isn’t even a good idea), but I do stand by it as something worth thinking about.