Is Swiss Junior-Hockey moving up or down?

The Swiss U20-team will finish 5^th or 6^th at the WJC after finishing 4^th last year. The U18-team finished 2^nd in a Five-Nations-Tournament (facing Czech Rep., Slovakia, Finland and Germany). The U16-team did win a Four-Nations-Tournament with Slovakia, Finland and Germany. The very good results lead us a bit to the wrong conclusions because these results overrate a bit the real level of Swiss Junior-Hockey. But it’s just a little bit. Personally I dare to say at this point that Swiss Junior Hockey did reach some sort of milestone, the Swiss did move up to the Slovaks and maybe even already did overtake them. I’m not a guy who values the result of a single game or a single tournament but my observations over the last 24 months led to this conclusion: Yes, we are right there, Swiss junior-hockey is even slightly better now than Slovak junior-hockey. This is a milestone and I do know very well what it takes to climb up in the ranking if you are already not very far away from the top. We are talking about No. 7 in the world. Compared with the Slovaks we have the better teams, better depth in the rosters, the Slovaks still have the slight edge in terms of producing outstanding talents.

What did make me happy following the recent games over Christmas (U20, U18 and U16) is the fact that our teams play with a lot of enthusiasm, with a lot of energy and with an optimistic approach. It’s not anymore the safety first destructive building a wall-approach – as it was a couple of years ago - the Swiss game-plans have now more variety, they skate very hard, the try to hit whatever they can catch and when they have the puck they really started to take some risks in a positive way. I appreciate this development very much. It will develop our players better than ever before.

What is still lacking in Swiss Junior Hockey is “High-End-Players”. It’s unrealistic to expect every year a handful of high-end-prospects but I don’t have an answer why we are still lacking star-players in the NHL. We do have good depth meanwhile and we do have a couple of players who are on the verge of becoming NHL-players (Niederreiter, Josi, Bärtschi) but we don’t have yet – at this point – players who are on the verge of becoming star-players or superstar-players in the NHL. We need them to take the next step. Slovakia, Germany, Belarus, even Austria and Slovenia have similar or even more very good NHL-players than the Swiss. Yes, we have Hiller but this is just the ticket to be allowed to compete because in today’s hockey every Top10-country has at least one very good goalie, so Hiller is much appreciated by me but he is not better than the No.1-goalies of other Top10-Hockey-countries – he is just right there. Streit is injured and if he plays again he is on a similar level than German d-man Ehrhoff. Our best forwards are not as good as the Slovenian Ance Kopitar. They are not as good as the best Slovak forwards (e.g. Gaborik), and with all respect to Mark Streit – he is not as good as the Slovak Zdeno Chara. Austria has one good or even very good and two decent NHL-forwards (Vanek, Grabner, Nodl). The Swiss have to close that gap first of all to the before-mentioned countries and - in case we want to move on – we have to improve significantly in the “star-player-category”.

What is also lacking in some parts of our hockey community is the understanding of our hockey-level. We are missing realistic expectations and the self-confidence to face the so called “brutal facts”. If I mix the media-comments before the U20-WJC and after finishing 5^th/6^th I did understand between the lines that a medal was somehow expected and that it is a slight disappointment to finish 5^th/6^th and losing 4:1 and 8:0 to Canada. The reality is: It was a great, great victory vs Germany – who had an excellent age-group in this tourney and definitely didn’t deserve to go down. It was a great, great victory vs the Slovaks who had a couple of high-end-forwards in their squad. The Swiss did win both games and these heroic wins were just great and not normal! The realistic chances to win these games for the Swiss were not better than 50:50.

We also have to respect that if you follow very closely a game between our best junior-hockey-players and e.g. the best US, Sweden, Canada and parts of the Russian and Finnish players – there is still a gap, sometimes even a big gap. Their best players are simply better educated, they skate better, they handle the puck better, they are bigger and stronger and the shot-quality is noticeably better than the average Swiss sho-quality – these are the brutal facts and these brutal facts won’t even change after a surprising win vs one of the big hockey-countries. As long as we lose 4 out of 5 games vs these big hockey-countries there is no reason to believe that we are right there. We are not! And if we are not happy that we are not there yet we have to be self-critical enough to face these facts and to fight for improvement. This improvement will come with “state-of the art-projects”, with concepts and with money who supports all this. I can tell you I see these projects and I did read some very good Swiss hockey-concepts for improving but sometimes I feel that the most important puzzle-piece is still missing: It’s the teachers, the coaches, the educators of our educators. If you want to be world-class - in whatever discipline it might be - it’s a question of quantity (how many hours do I practice a certain thing, in our case hockey) and quality of methodic/didactic. The combination of the most practice-time and the best teachers lead together with a certain personality of the athlete (passionate, self-critical, hard-working and mentally tough) to world-class. What Swiss hockey is still missing – and it will be one of the last puzzle-pieces to world-class – is this high-end-teaching, world-class hockey-educators. Don’t get me wrong. What Swiss hockey achieved so far is a lot and we have to appreciate and respect this, I definitely do so! Hundreds of junior-coaches did spend big amounts of their spare-time educating boys who want to learn playing hockey. They don’t get real money for it, they just do it for fun because they are puck-heads, they love the sport of hockey! All these coaches and educators are responsible for what we have achieved so far. But now – if we want to become realistic medal-contenders and if we want to develop “high-end” hockey players, if we want to “produce” regular NHL-Allstars, we have to take the next step, we have to try to find the best possible hockey-educators and bring them to Switzerland, helping to improve all our great coaches, help them to take the next step from being very good hockey-educators to world-class hockey-educators.

Coming back to my question in the topic: Switzerland did take one step in the right direction. Switzerland did move up from No. 8 to No. 7 – let’s say in the age-group 15-25. But Swiss hockey is still several steps away from the best hockey-countries in the world. I just partly agree that the main reason for this is the small amount of hockey-players compared to Canada e.g. The bigger amount of hockey-players means that a country has more depth and the proof for this is if we watch how the NA-Import-players – who are not good enough for the NHL – still dominate the scoring-lists in our league. I don’t agree that a small country necessarily will produce a lower quality national-team – we just need 26 very good players for a great national-team. Because you need “just” 26 good players this gives also smaller countries like Switzerland a good chance to compete on the highest-possible level. Of course, if you can choose from more players you always will have an advantage but this is just part of the truth. If we do everything “state of the art” – we can compete with everybody on a national-team-level. So let’s try to do everything “state of the art”. Let’s face the brutal facts. Let’s be proud of what we achieved and now let’s go for the next step!

Thomas Roost 
Central Scouting Europe                                                4th January 2011