IIHF Worlds 2016 / A resumé plus some thoughts about team Switzerland

Even before the medal ceremony at this year's World Championship in Russia, our columnist Thomas Roost provides you with ten general observations about international hockey plus five Swiss-specific 

I write this résumé before the semi-finals. I guess all four semi-finalists performed pretty well, so there is no need to wait for some more observations until the very end. I will look at some overall tendencies but will also have some specific comments on team Switzerland.

What did this World Championship show us?

1. Except for Russia, the top nations didn’t show up with high-end rosters. Too many potential player-additions were missing and the World Cup of Hockey next September is probably a reason for that.

2. Although most top-nations did show up with B- or even C-rosters (Sweden), all of these top nation-teams managed more or less easily to qualify for the quarterfinals. When I look a bit deeper – means at the probable and not only at the real results in all these games - and I also take into consideration the latest U20- and U18-developments - I come to the conclusion that the gap between the top-six nations and the growing next group (rankings 7-14) widened up again. Not very long ago the teams ranked 4-6 were not that far away from this group but now I notice that the best teams of the 7-14 group are more or less stagnating in their attempts to improve further.

3. On the very top, I start to notice a growing “traffic jam.” Times are long gone when Canada and Russia were ahead of everybody. Sweden and the US improved significantly in the past 10 years and if they all can bring their best players to a tourney – e.g. the September 2016 World Cup – it’s impossible now to make out a favorite when they play each other.

4. But stop, not so fast, I see even more traffic at the very top: Finland gained significant ground to these top 4 nations, in 2016 they are U20- and U18-World Champions plus now, one of the semi-finalists in the senior World Championship. The improvement of Finnish hockey from an already high-level to top-level is indeed impressive! I also notice some rebound-signs in Czechian hockey. They are not on the Finnish level quite yet in terms of player development, but after some painful years, it seems to go into the right direction again in this traditional hockey powerhouse-country.

Sebastian Aho

5. Some extremely young guns impressed a lot in this World Championship. The epic duel between the two 18-year-olds Auston Matthews and Patrik Laine was one of the highlights, plus, we could witness the unbelievable puck-carrying speed of Connor McDavid and the great potential of Noah Hanifin, Nikolaj Ehlers, Leon Draisaitl, Sebastian Aho, Dylan Larkin, Sasha Barkov, and David Pastrnak, just to name a few. This World Championship was a showcase of the next wave of high-end hockey players, future NHL-stars, and superstars.

6. I couldn’t see a really new trend in terms of game plans, strategies, systems, and so on. I feel that the NHL is still the trendsetter in hockey and there we have the Tampa Bay Lightning – as I already mentioned in an earlier column - with the tendency to stay away from typical scoring and checking lines and stay away of one-dimensional offensive or defensive defensemen. In the future, one needs to have skilled, fast, mobile, gritty top players in all four units in offense and defense.

7. Coming back to the World Championship: I did witness some great goaltending here and there in certain games, but maybe not a real high-end goaltender, although the Finnish duo was very solid and Czechian late bloomer with a lion-heart, Dominik Furch, confirms once more that goalies can also develop at an older age. Furch appeared more or less out of the blue one or two years ago and now he is probably on the NHL-radar.

8. Russia, the “Big Red and sometimes moody Machine”. This “Red Machine” confirmed that if the machine is amused it’s simply a great pleasure to watch it play. Tic-tac-toe – moves, dekes, puck-control and this at high-speed and under constant pressure from not that weak opponents. The beauty of the game of hockey! Respect!

9. The US showed up with a very young squad, younger than 23 years old on average and still quite competitive. They do a lot of things the right way in their NTDP development program…

10. The chasing middle of the pack group of nations is growing. Not long ago, it was Slovakia, Switzerland, Germany, and Latvia. Nowadays, we also have Denmark, Norway and Belarus and also the relegated nations never go home empty handed (Hungary won their first game in the top division, Kazakhstan beat SUI and last year, Austria got relegated although they won five points altogether). So, not only the group of nations at the very top is growing, but also the group of followers… but as I told before: In my opinion, the gap between these two groups widened up again, at least a bit. 

What about Switzerland?

1. Switzerland performed more or less as expected. Maybe the one or the other additional point would have been possible, but also fewer points and the danger of relegation were not that far away.

2. It looks like the silver medal in 2013 was full of poison because it raised expectations to unrealistic heights and this unnecessary pressure still haunts us.

3. Swiss hockey is in a stagnation phase and finds itself in the middle of the pack group ranked 7-12. And when I look into the future and analyze our U20- and U18-teams, there is no reason to assume that there is much improvement on the horizon. With the players we have, it’s naive to expect more than a 50% chance of a quarter-final-qualification- in the near future. (None of our players in this WC was younger than 23…). Just look at the results of the past five or ten years and accept where our hockey is really ranked. Dreaming is allowed but I guess it will cause more nightmares sweet-dreams…

4. This World Championship also confirmed that there is a quite significant gap regarding quality between our NHL and NLA players. I guess some people indeed overrate the quality of our league because it’s a high entertaining league. However, when we look at the performances of our best NLA players here at this World Championship, we have to admit that all of them are far away from being considered a WC all-star. However, the performances of Nino Niederreiter and Sven Andrighetto made me very happy! Swiss hockey is not bad at all and we have some decent and even a handful of good players, but we have to be confident enough to judge us realistically and not getting trapped with cheap positive thinking-rhetoric. Unrealistic positive thinking is as bad and dangerous as negative thinking. Focused thinking is what we need.

Nino Niederreiter

5. Our common focus, energy, and brainpower should be channeled into producing more and better players. But sad enough, for such an act of solidarity and collaboration, our “suffering” is not big enough yet. This means we are still talking way too much about coaches and players who should have played or should not have played etc. Of course, all these details are very important as well, but rest assured: A concentrated, critical, transparent, open-minded and passionate round-table discussion of all Swiss “hockey-brains” with the target to take national actions to further improve our player-development and to raise the number of kids who want to play hockey would be more fruitful. 

Baar, 22nd May 1960 / Thomas Roost

THE FOOL DOTH THINK HE IS WISE, BUT THE WISE MAN KNOWS HIMSELF TO BE A FOOL.

It’s a common habit that losers try to copy winners. “The winners did everything right,” is a very common assumption – although it’s pretty stupid to believe in this ;-).

So, let’s have a look at the four semi-finalists in the NHL. What are they doing differently than others? They will set the new trends in hockey because they won and we – maybe wrongly – assume that they will also win in the future with the same ingredients.

One of the “wisdoms” is that you have to be a big sized team to be successful in the NHL and yes: If you look at the St. Louis Blues they have with 187.5cm on average the second tallest team in the NHL, so the Blues are the “proof” that you have to have especially tall guys in your team. But wait, not so fast, there is a small group of “renegades” telling that you easily can win with a short team and yes: Look at another semi-finalist, the Pittsburgh Penguins: on average, they are nearly 3cm smaller in size than the Blues and just the NHL’s No. 25 in this aspect. Hmmm… the fact is that the 2nd tallest, then No. 13, 16 and 25 are the semi-finalists. So, the unspectacular truth is: One can’t assume that you have to be a tall or short sized to be successful. By the way, the tallest (Arizona Coyotes) and the shortest team (New Jersey Devils) both did not manage to catch a playoff spot…

Ok, let’s turn the page. To win in the NHL, you need to have muscles and weight and the proof for this are the San Jose Sharks and the St. Louis Blues; they both rank 5th and 6th in terms of weight. Their bodies have an average weight of more than 93kg. But… I guess…. You know it already: not so fast! We have also the Tampa Bay Lightning with 90.6 kg (ranked 22nd) and the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3rd last in this ranking with an average weight of “only” 89kgs. Hmmm…

Well, bingo, I have the answer! You need to be an experienced team to win in the NHL. Others will tell you: No, I don’t believe in this, I guess you need to have a young team to succeed. Young teams have much more energy than old teams. You need to be young and energetic.  The –once again–unspectacular truth is that, on the one hand, you have the San Jose Sharks which have the 3rd most experienced team with an average age of 28.5 years and on the other hand there are the Tampa Bay Lightning (26.3 years) with the 4th youngest roster of all NHL-teams. And then we have the Pittsburgh Penguins and the St. Louis Blues, they both are more or less middle of the pack in this category. So, again, also, the average age of a team gives us no clue at all.

Next wisdom: You need to have a top goalie to win in the NHL. Ok, let’s face all the goalie rankings from different reliable hockey-sources. If I look at data from the last two years up to a couple of weeks ago, I come to a more or less consistent Top 10 or 11 goalie-ranking: 1. Lundqvist, 2. Price, 3. Quick, 4. Holtby, 5. Schneider, 6. Crawford, 7. Rask, 8. Fleury, 9. Smith 10. Bobrovsky, 11. Mrazek.  You know what?
Not even one of these goalies – and this is NOT my personal goalie-ranking, it is a summary of rankings published in reliable hockey-magazines such as The Hockey News – is a goalie of the four semi-finalists.

Does this mean that you don’t need an excellent goalie to succeed? Partly yes; these statistics supports my thesis that you “only” need” at least average goaltenders to succeed but not necessarily the best ones. To be very precise: You definitely need good or even very good goaltending to succeed in NHL-playoffs, but there is a small but important difference between being basically a very good goalie and displaying very good goaltending… This means that an average goalie is also capable of dishing out excellent playoff-run-performances. Every goalie has hot and cold streaks and if you are an average goalie but you are lucky enough to have a hot streak then you will put exactly the good performance on the ice when it is needed most: Good goaltending. And even if you are Henrik Lundqvist and you are unlucky enough to be on a cold streak… then…

Now, let’s turn to another often heard NHL “playoff-wisdom”: The San Jose Sharks and the St. Louis Blues can never win, these are the typical loser teams with “loser-poster-boys” like Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton. You need the playoff warriors and winner-personalities like Jonathan Toews and Corey Crawford, who always play at their best when it counts the most. Well… again… not so fast. Joe Thornton was voted as the 2nd-star in the successful quarterfinal Game 7 versus Nashville. Thornton and Marleau are now heading to the semi-final and the same goes for the so-called “chronic loser team” St. Louis Blues. What about Toews and Crawford? They lost with the Blackhawks in the first round and both underperformed compared to what they are able to put on the table. Toews and Crawford were playoff heroes one year ago but the following is often forgotten: Crawford, for example, also played pretty below average in last year’s playoff first round. The unspectacular truth is that there are probably no players who are always bad or always good in clutch times. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they are not. Again, a boring result, unspectacular facts. But, not so fast: Are these facts really boring, is this really unspectacular?

For me, all these unspectacular findings are extremely spectacular because it proves more or less that we know much less about successful hockey than we might admit. I compare our hockey knowledge a little bit with the knowledge of brain scientists. Our brain and the sport of hockey is most exciting and we try to discover and control everything as fast as possible. We are unbelievably hungry in terms of statistical knowledge, but, at the same time, we are often too uncritical of theories and “hocus-pocus”. Let’s realize that we know just very little about the mystery of our brains and we indeed do not know that much about winning in hockey in top-level competitions. Winning and losing is still a mystery to a huge extent and, probably, the luck-factor is still underrated in our analysis. But this is exactly what makes our sport of hockey so attractive. The outcome of results of games between two major-league pro-teams is still quite unpredictable and this is a big reason why I love hockey so much.

Let’s embrace ice-hockey and let’s further study our game with critical but also with winking eyes and always remember the following quote by William Shakespeare: "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." ;-)

Thomas Roost, May 2016