North America has been the most fun team from start to finish. USATSI
Team North America will find out after today’s game between Finland and Russia whether or not they’ll advance to the semifinals. Despite wins over Sweden and Finland themselves, they’re at the mercy of whether or not the already eliminated Finns show up to give Russia a real game.
It is both the unfortunate quirk and drama-triggering success of the World Cup format. A four-team round robin with only three games to be played by each team makes the margin for error thin. And by not beating Sweden in regulation, Team North America couldn’t clinch a spot outright. A win for the Finns today over Russia puts the 23-and-under players through to the semis for a dream game against Canada.
Whether North America advances or not is irrelevant. Over three tournament games, and we can even throw in their three exhibition games, they have taken this tournament and possibly the game of hockey as a whole to another level.
Thanks to their style of play, their youthful exuberance and the heart-pumping finishes to their last two games, they have been the best thing about this World Cup of Hockey.
Here’s why…
1. This was the right team at the exact right time to try this experiment
On paper, the idea to take the youngest players out of USA and Canada’s talent pool and stick them together sounded ludicrous. To me, the biggest issue was preventing these guys from representing their own countries at a time when they were ready. In reality, maybe one player — Connor McDavid — makes Team Canada and maybe only three or four get on Team USA’s roster.
But when the projected rosters started filtering out, the brilliance of this idea started to become clearer. When the official rosters were named, co-GMs Peter Chiarelli and Stan Bowman did not overthink anything. They took truly the best players with arguments for only a few players that didn’t make it.
What this team has proven is that the quality of young North American players in the league is increasing with each passing year. This team had four of the last five first overall picks and each of them has looked tremendous, even most recent No. 1 Auston Matthews, who hasn’t even played a single NHL game yet. But the talent goes well beyond them. These players are entering the league more prepared and less-intimidated than ever before.
It’s not just about their talent that makes them such an exciting group, though. It’s the way they all play the game. Speed, creativity, a complete lack of fear of making mistakes and taking risks.
Maybe the results would have been the same if they tried this idea four years ago, but it feels like this collection of players was almost too perfect for this tournament.
2. As much as we’d like to see it, it is near-impossible for NHL teams to replicate
The reason North America’s run-and-gun style is so exciting is that they have skill players in every single position. Unfortunately, the worldwide hockey talent pool isn’t deep enough to try to fill a league with teams that play like Team North America.
You need a certain quality of player and you need a lot of them. That’s what makes this team so special. NHL clubs can replicate their style, but they can’t play it to this degree of success. Not with the salary cap at least.
The Dallas Stars and Pittsburgh Penguins are about as close as we’re going to get, which is why both of those teams were so fun to watch late last season and into the playoffs.
Will the league continue trending towards this direction of speed and skill? Yes, almost certainly, because we’re seeing the most successful teams win with those qualities over grit. As more of those teams win more games, more teams follow suit. The league will also continue getting younger because not only are these guys good, a lot of them are still on entry-level contracts. When you get on-ice value out of young players, you’re going to have more overall success as a team.
For now, we just have to appreciate this for what it was, a breathtaking one off that hopefully raises the profile of every single one of these players and emboldens NHL teams to hand more responsibilities to their young guys.
3. Let’s watch the kids clown some (relatively) old folks
The number of incredible plays this team has made is too great to recap here.
The play of the tournament belongs to Nathan MacKinnon, who – thanks to the hustle from Johnny Gaudreau to get him the puck – had hockey’s version of a half hour to decide what to do to Henrik Lundqvist. He could have gone with the quick shot, but he chose to dunk on one of the great goalies in the game today instead.
The quickness with which he pulls off this move is impressive, but to appreciate the sheer brilliance of it, we have to see it slowed down.
Earlier in that game we got to see the otherworldly skating ability of Connor McDavid, who turnred two defensemen into turnstiles, which then led to Auston Matthews deking around a defender from his knees before dishing off a perfect pass to Morgan Rielly, with Matthews capping the play with a rebound goal. That was 30 seconds into the game.
Oh, and what about Johnny Gaudreau deking Lundqvist into the stands on this breakaway?
Or this incredible tip vs. Finland?
The creativity these kids possess is off the charts, which is why we’ll see so many of them atop league scoring charts for years to come.
4. Speed + Skill = Wins
We’ve all been raving about the speed of this team and it’s true, every single player can skate like the wind. But you have to know how to use and you also have to have the skill to finish the plays you create with speed.
That’s been the most impressive thing about this group. They used their speed to aid the possession game, particularly in puck retrieval. They took away time and space from their opponents. No player seemed to do that better in this tournament than Nathan MacKinnon, who was a force in all three zones. It’s no wonder that he’s also one of the league’s most explosive skaters.
Perhaps the most effective way they utilized their speed was to recover when they did turn the puck over or when they made mistakes. They really seemed to have honed that over the six games (including pre-tournament) they played because they seemed to be best at recovery against Sweden. The players would get back and before Sweden could get set, they were all in position. Knowing where you need to go is just as important as getting there and they did that so extraordinarily well.
The skill level of these players from stickhandling, to passing, to on-ice vision, to hockey sense, all of these kids are so advanced. They were making precision passes, holding onto pucks for that extra second to make the right play instead of the first one and finding shooting lanes. They took chances, but they were always in the name of trying to create some offense.
When you throw in the pre-tournament games, North America scored 24 goals over six games for an average of four per game. Their offense was always their best defense and it often overwhelmed their opponents.
Some predicted this team would get destroyed by more experienced teams. Sweden is the reigning Olympic silver medalist and they might have a better roster now than they did then. The kids jumped on them early and then beat them in overtime.
This is why so many North Americans are rooting for Finland against Russia. Who doesn’t want to see these kids go toe-to-toe with the tournament’s best team in Canada? They might lose, but it will be fun to see just how big a scare they can put into the reigning Olympic gold medalists.
5. We may never see this again
As great as North America was, I have to wonder if we’ll see it in future World Cups.
If USA Hockey is worried about competitiveness, and surely they will be after the embarrassment of this tournament, they could easily start lobbying now to have the idea tossed to leave the young players available. Only a few probably would have made USA the way it was being run this year, but guys like Gaudreau and Eichel certainly would have helped.
On top of that, the growth of hockey in Switzerland and other countries is going to make it tougher to keep those burgeoning hockey nations out. Even if Team North America and Team Europe are good for the entertainment factor, it’s not the best for the world game to shut out top hockey nations from these best-on-best tournaments. That’s especially true if the NHL decides to discontinue Olympic participation.
I will definitely not complain if they decide to keep this North America-Europe format for future World Cups, but that could also be entirely dependent on the players available. Having the players the NHL had available for this team for this particular tournament is going to be hard to replicate.
McDavid is the best overall NHL prospect since Crosby and Ovechkin, while Matthews and Eichel are the best American prospects since Patrick Kane and before Kane it was Mike Modano. You can never really predict what the player pool is going to look like then since players eligible for that team might still be three years away from being drafted at all. There’s at least a chance North America wouldn’t even be close to as good in four years.
This was the year to do it and if this is the last time we see Team North America, it will be remembered as one of the best things that happened during the 2016 World Cup of Hockey.
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