Sunday, February 23, 2014

My Silent Olympic Hockey Truth

The loud „not so much truth“ is a disastrous statistical goal performance of the so called and overrated best forwards in the world like e.g. Crosby, Nash, Tavares, Ovechkin, Malkin, Sedin, they all scored just one or even zero goals at the Olympics. The same goes for all Swiss forwards who „proofed“ not to be able to score on the highest level.

My personal Olympic hockey truth is as follows:
Don’t read too much into a tournament-format like the Olympics. Just 4-7 games for each player. The above-mentioned players are of course the best forwards in the world and they are not overrated. They proof that they can score vs the very best since years. In general this hockey-tournament did show more than ever before that international hockey did develop a lot. In today’s hockey-world also the smaller countries can produce easily 30 competitive hockey-players if they do their homework. Take these hockey-players, implement for them a defense-first strategy and build a mutually supportive team-chemistry. The result of this: Even the very best teams with the very best forwards will have big problems to score and in single game formats - as it is in the Olympics - a lot can happen result-wise. This doesn’t mean that the best players from the top-countries are not better than the players from the smaller countries. Modern training-programs lead into a decent level of a lot of players and this level is not that far away from the very best. This is the nowadays men’s hockey-world, not so much yet the women’s hockey-world although also women hockey develops slowly but steadily into this direction. For the average Olympic fan who basically just watches hockey every four years it’s pretty frustrating because he can’t see the performance-difference between the very best and the next level players. To notice these differences is getting more and more difficult and this is definitely not spectacular. Even worse for the average Olympic fan: If he follows a game like e.g. CAN vs USA there are some of the very best players on this planet and because they level each other out it’s not easy to notice on what high level they play our great sport, the sport of hockey. This normal and healthy development of our sport is also tricky for the real hockey-fans and for some media. It’s tricky because we tend to overrate the results and the stats of this just handful of games. We read things into actual results instead of reading things into the most possible results. If Sidney Crosby doesn’t score in a handful of games we might get trapped into thinking that he is an overrated player. Sidney Crosby and all the other above mentioned superstars in hockey are not overrated, they are that good but the gap between this category of players and the next category is not like Five-Star Hotel and Two-Star-Hotel. It’s more like Five- to Four-Star with the tendency to Five- to four and a half-star and this leads into short-term stats where fanwise unknown players can easily look better than the superstars. To stay with my silent truth: I could really still see the difference between the very best hockey-teams and players and the next category but the differences are getting smaller and this means that it’s now possible that even Latvia can beat Canada with their best players in a single game on a given night with very lucky bounces. This is the modern hockey-world. Fact of the modern hockey-world is also that today’s best players are significantly better than the best players 20 and 40 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to take away just a tiny little bit of Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr, Makarov, Krutov, Fetisov, Larionov and so on; this would be completely unfair and they have my deepest respect, but it’s reality: With their performance 20 or 40 years ago they couldn’t be superstars anymore. Hockey did develop a lot and it’s easier to push the level of hockey-players from 60/100 to 90/100 compared to improve from 90/100 to 95/100. In modern hockey we have worldwide much more 90/100 players than 20 or 40 years ago and these players make life of the maybe ten 95/100 players miserable.


My Swiss “truth”:
Swiss hockey did improve to a nasty to play competitor approx. 10 years ago although the  Swiss usually got outshot quite badly vs the very best. It was not clear anymore that they will lose all games vs the very best. The Swiss did achieve this with slightly improved skills and decent to good skating players, with solid goal-tending, excellent defensive structure and hard working teamplay especially in the plays without the puck in the defensive aspect of the game. Since approx. Since 10 years it’s not easy anymore to score vs the Swiss senior national-team. In the last two to three years I noticed an additional step forward: The Swiss have now a handful of really good and skilled d-men and a couple of forwards who can create goal-scoring-chances also on the highest level. Of course, the silver-medal at the 2013 “Worlds” was not a normal result but the Swiss are now one of the “boys” who can win a medal in certain circumstances. Most important the Swiss did achieve this with even-keel amounts of goal-scoring-chances and shots vs the very best, it was not anymore just a defense-first strategy and praying to god that the goalie will be hot. They played to eye-level in all aspects with the very best for the first time in hockey-history. It was interesting to see how all this looks vs the very best of the very best in the Olympics.

The loud “not so much truth”: The silver-medal was just a fluke, Swiss hockey is overrated, they couldn’t score at all and even did lose vs Latvia. This was a shock in a lot of media and a big disappointed in the whole Swiss hockey-world.

Coming back to my personal Swiss truth:
The Swiss confirmed in this Olympic tournament that they can compete on the highest level in most aspects of the game. They played well vs Latvia in the group game (double amount of shots), very well vs Sweden – just 26:31 shots, well and a bit lucky vs the Czechs 26:26 shots and did outshoot Latvia again in the 1/8-final by quite a clear margin. The Swiss team was able to create goal-scoring-chances even vs. the very best and they slightly dominated Latvia in both games. Partly because of some unlucky bounces the loss to Latvia happened, partly also because of the real good performance of the Latvian team. But please put in front of your face the game Latvia vs. Canada, this was a result of modern hockey-development. The Swiss did lose 0-1 vs Sweden and played nearly (not quite) as good as the Swedes. It was a more or less equal game vs the Czechs (SUI did win 1-0) although in this game the Swiss were a bit lucky. It was overall a really good performance of the Swiss hockey-team. The Swiss really did take the next step forward. It was clear from the very beginning that the Swiss won’t score a lot and the now collective outcry is a bit surprising for me. If players like Crosby, Tavares, Toews, Getzlaf, Nash St.Louis, Perry, Marleau, Ovechkin, Malkin, D. Sedin and Kane combined to just three goals altogether (before the gold-medal-game) – this tells you something and definitely tells you that the expectations for a lot of Swiss goals with no NHL-star-forwards was simply much too high. It was clear that the goal-production in the last World-Championsship was too high compared to the normal level. And now it’s positively clear for me that the Swiss goal-production was too low compared to the amount of goal-scoring-chances, compared to the most probable outcome of the level they played on. Yes, I really did like the Swiss hockey Olympic performance. Goaltending was very good, the Swiss never had better dmen and with Josi a real world-class defender. The forwards improved in terms of skills and creating goal-scoring-chances. What is still missing is high-level-shooting-quality and more depth in terms of high-end forward-skills. The Swiss confirmed the next step. They are still one or two steps behind the very best and  it will be extremely difficult to close this gap. But this achieved level means that they always will have some sort of medal-chance in World Championships but don’t forget, other smaller countries are nearly on the same level and if the Swiss can beat the best on a given night they of course always will have also the “chance” to lose to Latvia, Germany, Norway e.g. on bad nights. Again:  This is the result of the modern hockey development.

To all experts: It’s very complicated to predict things in an Olympic hockey-tournament and very tricky to look for wisdoms in such a small tourney. Please take this into consideration if you bash the Russians and praise the gold-medalists. Again: Is there one expert who would have predicted that Toews, Crosby, Malkin, Ovechkin, Getzlaf, Perry, D. Sedin, Tavares, St.Louis, Marleau and Kane would combine for just three goals in the tournament? The world is complicated and this doesn’t fit to the thirst for findings of what is right and wrong on this planet and in hockey. We have to be humble enough to accept that even experts don’t know much about the world and about hockey. There are much more question-marks than answers. If somebody claims for the opposite he might not be an expert… A strong individual subjective opinion is not a reliable indication for the truth, a soft conviction might be more informative…

Enjoy the gold-medal-game! I definitely will!


Thomas Roost                                               23rd February 2014