russia is a much larger nation than sweden and have many more active players, they should be able to win more gold than Sweden.
because Post #9 went the full Don Cherry "RUSSIAN HOCKEY STINKS" to derail the topic
It's a good thing all of the other teams adopted the same philosophy of not having any NHLers at all at those two tournaments.
Russia just needs all of the other teams to not send any of their best players and their accomplishments speak for themselves.
There hasn't been "best on best" in 9.5 years. Best on best hockey discussions are not relevant to discussing the current landscape of international hockey because they do not exist. It is left to mere hypotheticals.
Then the Sharks aren't a gold candidate for me either, because they just can't do it.
As much as I'm having fun poking holes in the logic of the folks who want to pump Russia's tires, I think the failure by the US (and boy howdy, do they ever fail on a regular basis) to win gold doesn't mean those countries aren't gold medal contenders. That Germany and Latvia were 2 and 3 this year - and close 2 and 3 - means that those teams are gold medal contenders. They were both a couple of bounces away from earning a medal of a different colour.
So nobody is ever a candidate to do anything until they've done it? Brilliant.
so you're just using 'candidates' to mean 'teams that have already won', the OP frames it as a forward-facing discussion, but if you're just looking in a backwards-facing sense, then I suppose anyone can just look at the results and count the victories over whatever time period they deem personally relevant, themselves
Okay I got it!
I made that clear in my opening comment. I have described the "candidates" and ask whether they are still gold candidates.
Depth? Perhaps not. But you are forgetting that because Finland have so much center depth their still able to play Rantanen, Laine and either Aho or Hintz on the wing if they would want that. Also, a player like Lundell on a top6 wing could be a lot better than some of you stat watchers would believe.
Well the NHL is really a bad comparison now. In world ice hockey things are more concrete and clearer. The NHL would be a topic in itself again.
Nah, they're excuses. Every country has its issues with sending a good roster. Canadian fans usually pre-deploy these excuses when the roster is named, when they start talking about this is our F team or whatever. Shut up and drop the puck. Whoever is still standing on the last Sunday gets bragging rights. Everyone else needs to do better.
It's a fine comparison.
As I said, you can respond to my initial comment or understand it correctly. And of course you can't compare the conditions in the NHL with those in IIHF world ice hockey at all.
Forward Depth is pretty obvious. Despite having a similar number of NHL Forwards (35 vs. 32), Russians produced over 200 more NHL points in 2022-23. Man to a man, 1 vs. 1 on down, Russia has a better forward than Finland... faceoffs present a bit of an issue to work around I suppose for a fictional "best-on-best" competition.
Finland's defense could plausibly get bandaided for a singular best-on-best competition assuming Heiskanen is ready to take on the big role. On an overall player production level, it is quite bad at the moment with how much it craters off after him. It's not like the theoretical #1 Best-on-Best DMan that Russia would have in Sergachev is bad or anything.
Kucherov is at worst a peer with Rantanen, certainly not "worse"
A) this isn't a discussion among coaches. It is a discussion among fans.
yes, national team stuff aside, Russia had a period where their goaltenders were a terrible (there was a time when Khabibulin was basically the only guy, then Khabibulin and Nabokov then eventually Bryzgalov until others like Varlamov and Bobrovsky came), then a period with just awful Defensemen where it was like an old Sergei Gonchar, Andrei Markov, Fedor Tyutin, and like... Anton Volchenkov and Denis Grebeshkov and that was all you had, and now it's a pretty well-balanced collective performing well in the NHL level... and Ovechkin, Malkin, Kucherov, Vasilevskiy, Kuznetsov, Tarasenko, Sergachev, Nichushkin.. all of those players are ones who are world champion Stanley Cup winning performers that played monster roles on their teams that won in the last five or so years. This year, Barbashev (1st line forward) or Bobrovsky (presumptive Conn Smythe favorite Goaltender) will join that list as well. It's a fairly strong era for Russian-based NHL players.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this, as they by and large play on separate NHL teams as you'd expect with 30-32 NHL teams and Russians accounting for about 6 % of NHL players and the 'stars' only a smaller portion of that, so you'd expect them to be pretty spread out from each other.
