Hockey Nights in Canada

It isn’t the same as 1972: White Hat/Black Hat. Capitalist/Communist. Us/Them. Good/Bad. These days, players from opposite ends of the hockey globe summer with each other, best-man for each other, assist and exact vengeance for each other. Malkin/Crosby. Ovechkin/Green. Datsyuk/Lidstrom. And merrily we go along.

Still, the Olympic Games are the Olympic Games. If you win, you’re the best for four years. You might win a Stanley Cup, but the title is soon turned over – or has been ever since dynasties crumbled with free agency, the salary cap, central scouting, et al. But victory at the Games provides a championship writ large. See Canada in 2002: the country’s first men’s hockey gold in 50 years. Or the Czechs in 1998, when 200,000 people celebrated in downtown Prague. Or the Swedes in 2006, when, post-victory, Mats Sundin was lost for three days, leaving his NHL team to fend for itself while the tall centreman absorbed every living moment of the only Olympic title he would win. 

If the teams’ mutual antipathy isn’t what it once was, at least the style of hockey is faster, wilder and more beautiful, and shaken and stirred over two weeks, a new kind of sporting narrative might emerge.

It isn’t the same as 1972, but 2010 is the closest we’ll get. After Canada found surrogate rivals over the years in the Americans and the Czechs, Canada-Russia is alive again. Alexander Semin called Sidney Crosby “average,” and as a result, Semin wears a black hat. So does Geno Malkin, who hot-dogged his way through consecutive world junior tournaments before being made to look merely mortal at the hands of the Canadian defence. OV wears one too, not because he is bad, but because he is good. Very good. Very, very good. If last year’s Washington-Pitt seven-game quarter-final series proved anything, it’s that the War of the Northern Galacticos is upon us, and that neither maestro – not Crosby nor Ovechkin – wants to lose, let alone to each other.

To fans in Omsk, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk, Mike Richards wears a black hat. Chris Pronger also wears one, and, unless you cheer for the team he currently plays for – the Flyers – it’s hard not to know this even if his sweater is red, black and white. Ryan Getzlaf: black hat. Brenden Morrow? Yup. For all its skill and speed, the 2010 Canadian team is a lean, mean unit. Facing Ovechkin, Malkin, Datsyuk, Semin, Kovalchuk and Volchenkov, well, it has to be.

There are other players and other teams: the fastidious, darkly shadowed Finns; the young, resentful Americans; the past-champion Swedes, who generally save their best for these kinds of competitions; the threadbare but quick and savvy Slovaks; and Team Czech. The 2010 Winter Games also collects the best players from hockey’s latest star generation: Anze Kopitar, Zach Parise, Nick Backstrom, Mikko Koivu, Ales Hemsky. But, team to team, the best young Canadians and the best young Russians have long headed toward each other, from summit tours of their respective countries to under-18 competitions to world juniors and the world championships, where Canada has lost twice in consecutive years to the Big Red Machine.

In 1972, players from Canada and Russia had very little knowledge about each other’s countries or hockey programs. As a result, every broadcast was a revelation, and for years it seemed that without this veil of mystery and ignorance there could only be less dramatic impact between these national teams, never more. But almost 40 years later, familiarity has bred a degree of discontent, and without the iron curtain slamming down on Eastern Europe, that’s the friction we’re going to get. If the teams’ mutual antipathy isn’t what it once was, at least the style of hockey is faster, wilder and more beautiful, and shaken and stirred over two weeks in the mouth of the Coast Mountains, a new kind of sporting narrative might emerge. It’s how any sporting competition – hockey or otherwise – is judged, and, considering the nature of our times, it’s the most we can hope for.

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net