Quote:
Originally Posted by CAMOKAT
(Post 15279363)
chill man, you have no idea how I am.
You know I'm right. You invented hockey, we perfected it.
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no, i know you're wrong, because I was alive to watch it all go down. what the Soviets did, was give Canadian hockey a big wakeup call in the 1970's that the watered down NHL which had expanded way too much and way too quickly, had produced the Philadelphia Flyers, was having a horrible effect on all levels of Canadian hockey. Canada realized from the Soviets that their skating and stick/puck skills had deteriorated and it had spread down to every level of Canadian hockey. I won't take anything away from the Soviet teams of the 70's and early 80's - they were amazingly skilled teams - but STILL Canada more often than not found a way to beat them. And NEVER EVER EVER FORGET that on the biggest stage in the most important tournament to the Soviets, with arguably their best team ever, LOST to a team of American college boys at the Lake Placid Olympics.
Those great Soviet teams were the product of Communism. That's where Communism excels. The system has complete control over the individual - perfect incubator for building great athletes and teams.
Canada and USA Hockey too for that matter studied the parts of the Soviet sports system that could be tolerated over here. Kids today in Canada and the US are tagged early as potential players for their international/Olympic teams, there are summer camps where they are brought together, skills schools, national teams for all age divisions that have IHHF tournaments.
When the Soviet Union crumbled, Russian hockey crumbled too. It still produces some great skilled hockey players, but no longer does it produce great teams. Canada took back its superiority over hockey, a very slim superiority. As it should be - it's the only country on the planet where hockey is undisputably the number one sport. The world caught up to Canada in hockey, and later the US learned the world had caught up to it in basketball and now baseball - no longer will any one country be vastly superior to the rest of the world in any sport. Canada was absolutely horrible at the last Olympics.
Did the Soviet system perfect hockey? No doubt that the Soviets' goal was to build ONE perfect team. They came close. But that ONE perfect team lost to a bunch of fat out of shape Canadians in the late summer of 1972, lost to other Canadian NHL teams several times and that one perfect team lost to the American college team in 1984. Proving that hockey is a game not only of skill and organization.
I remember when Canadian teams were incapable of completing two passes in a row - it was horrible, there were still some great skilled Canadian players, mostly French Canadians, Gilbert Perrault who Tikhonov in '72 said was the only Canadian who could play for his team, Guy Lafleur - but the rest were pretty limited skill wise, guys who went up and down their wings like table hockey players, bashing into people or winding up for slapshots. Bobby Clarke represented the best and the worst in Canadian hockey and it all culminated in the single worst incident in sports I've ever seen - I was 8 years old. Nobody played with the heart of Bobby Clarke, nobody wanted to win more, the photos of his toothless maniacal grin on the ice are legend, he was a slight of build centerman from the Canadian praries, a diabetic who was told he'd never make the NHL - as the out of shape Canadians realized in 1972 that the Soviets were more skilled than they were, faster than they were and far more physically conditioned - Clarke took it upon himself to remove the Soviets best player Valery Kharmalov from the series - permanently. In the most despicable and brutal fashion he skated towards an unsuspecting Kharmalov and took his hockey stick like a baseball bat and swung two handedly at Kharmalov's ankle and shattered it.
That's why it's so great today to watch the Canadian kids play, they don't have to shatter the ankle of the other team's best player, they don't have to rely just on their Canadian grit and heart for the game - they can all skate like the wind and handle the puck - and still play with the same passion as the Canadian teams their dads and grandfathers did.
