Only last year France beat Canada in the opening match in the World Championship... Sure, that's an anomaly, but the point still stands... Good day for the bottom team, bad day for the top team, a fluke goal happens and hope you have decent defense and a good goalie. If they're lucky, both Slovenia and Austria can beat Canada.
Which things exactly? Division III games routinely end up in double digits, so obviously if Division IIA teams played them the gap would be even greater. So the equivalent on the top end of the scale would be if Canada crushed the bottom teams with like 25-0 every time they faced off. So that's not wrong.
And regarding Korea's climb in the rankings, before 2009 Korea had never even once finished better than last in Division I, meaning 27th or 28th place at the time since a parallel division structure was used. since then they've never been even close to be relegated back to Division II and even managed to stay in Division IA in 2013.
And regarding "import" players? You know how many was used that one year when they had their best performance yet? 1, Brock Radunske. That's it. In the two years after that they've never had more than 3. So the vast majority of players are still Korean natives. So those "import" players have only marginally contributed to their recent improvement.
No, if you wanna complain about "import" players, check out Croatia. Almost half their national team is AHL level players taken from other nations. And thanks to this sudden influx of import players, Croatia have managed to climb from a 26th place finish in 2009 to a 26th place finish in 2015. So yes, those ex-AHL made a big difference indeed...
And regarding the rest... Well, Korea's love for beating Japan is hardly debatable if you know anything about the country. And also inarguable is that Korea having a strong skating tradition, if you ever watch speed skating and short track during the Olympics that's apparent. In fact, Korea has probably the chance of in the future being the fastest national team in the world since pretty much everyone is a former speed skater. Not that that's too helpful in hockey if you can't also handle the puck at that pace but still, it's something. And regarding my prediction of Korea reaching Italy's level? Well, they're almost there already so I wouldn't call that a stretch. Give them a 5-10 years at this rate and they'll be there, assuming they up with the current push on hockey development.
So yeah, don't really see how I'm wrong here.
You're wrong in pretty much every single point that you've made in this thread.
You don't seem to understand the fundamentals of how popular and widespread hockey is in the world (or Korea specifically). You don't seem to understand that there are less than 20 countries with a full-scale hockey 'pyramid' in place, meaning that in most IIHF member states most of the national team players are amateurs - postmen, office workers, firemen, etc.
They have NOT invested thousands upon thousands of hours of their time to craft their hockey skills, their skating and so on like they do in Canada, Sweden or Latvia. It's a hobby and a recreational activity for them. Something similar to what frolf (a mix of frisbee and golf) is to us over here.
The mid-tier nations are mostly a collection of amateurs, semi-pros and a few minor pro players, if they're lucky.
When a certain 3rd-tier hockey federation for some reason decides to start investing money and resources into improving their hockey programme, it doesn't take much to improve things when most of your players are amateurs. You hire foreign coaches, you prop up a team with state support (ignoring any free market principles and the complete lack of demand for hockey), you start paying salaries to the players, so they could become full-time hockey players, and the results are almost instantaneous.
Korea has improved. I think it should be obvious to anyone who's been following international hockey for the past 5 or 10 years. But that's not the point you're making.
You're saying that just because they've leap-frogged Spain and Estonia (neither of which have a single pro hockey team, btw), they're going to continue 'trending sharply upwards', as if the distance between the skill level of all the national teams was linear and evenly distributed. It most certainly isn't. The number of man-hours and the amount of money needed to improve a national hockey programme to the level of Norway, Germany or Latvia is incomparable to the number of man-hours needed to improve Team New Zealand to the level of, say, Lithuania. That's the crucial bit you don't seem to understand.
Korea isn't trending sharply upwards, they've improved and have already plateaued in their growth, because the fundamentals in Korea haven't changed in any way, shape or form. They still don't have a league of their own, the popularity of hockey in Korea hasn't substantially increased, their player base is the same and their junior teams haven't made any progress, at all. It's just a medium-term project in preparation of the Olympic Games in Korea, so they could field a semi-competent team and avoid getting steamrolled in every game, which might happen anyway.
Their efforts have been focused on improving their national team, not their hockey pyramid in general. They're not growing the sport, they're trying to save their face in 2018. That's exactly what they've been doing over the past few years in a number of different winter sports outside of hockey as well.
After the Olympics hockey in Korea will return to being a recreational sport for a very tiny fraction of the Korean society, because the underlying cause of state support (saving face in the Olympics) for hockey will disappear, and the fundamentals will not have changed in the process.
