Canada no. 1

[jj cale]

Yeah, no. Sweden is basically Canada minus the crazy depth.

At best it's a toss-up between Russia, Finland, and us.

Not just depth, Sweden lacks the big top level offensive stars of Canada too right now.

 

[Yakushev72]

Based on what we have so far, let's close this thread out by saying that Canada will remain #1 for at least the next 10 or 15 years, and nobody really cares about #'s 2-10.

 

[JackSlater]

I honestly don't understand your point. It doesn't make sense to me. Given the intensive and competitive nature of Canadian hockey from childhood up, you have, as in USA basketball, a broad pyramid of talent that keeps getting narrowed at each successive level until the best finally arrive in the NHL. So when you have 721,000 players laying out that pyramid, you have a massive advantage over Finland at 71,000, by any theory of the occurrence of natural athletic talent in a genetic population.

You brush that aside by saying that you can only have 25 players on a team. Even the law of averages would suggest that you should have 10 times as much talent on the Canadian team as on the Finnish team, unless there was some reason that Canada is producing dramatically fewer great players than they should be expected to do. I think you're totally wrong, unless you can produce some way to support your point.

How can Canada be expected to produce a team with ten times the talent? Canada can ice a team with only 25 players. Fortunately, Canada can ice 25 elite players. If Finland can ice even just 3 elite players, then it is impossible for the Canadian team to ice ten times as many elite players since the limit is 25, not 30. If Finland has 4 elite players, Canada might have 40, but the team can only have 25 players, thus far from 10 times. Hence, the roster limitations make countries look more competitive with the top country than they actually are. Add in the fact that hockey is a pretty random game in small sizes, and even Switzerland can beat Canada's best from time to time. No country has been unbeatable to the others since maybe the early 1960s.

 

[Yakushev72]

How can Canada be expected to produce a team with ten times the talent? Canada can ice a team with only 25 players. Fortunately, Canada can ice 25 elite players. If Finland can ice even just 3 elite players, then it is impossible for the Canadian team to ice ten times as many elite players since the limit is 25, not 30. If Finland has 4 elite players, Canada might have 40, but the team can only have 25 players, thus far from 10 times. Hence, the roster limitations make countries look more competitive with the top country than they actually are. Add in the fact that hockey is a pretty random game in small sizes, and even Switzerland can beat Canada's best from time to time. No country has been unbeatable to the others since maybe the early 1960s.

If Finland has 4 elite players on a national team, which is possible because Finland has an excellent development program, Canada should still outnumber them with elites 25-4, unless Canada isn't developing the sheer talent as well as it could.

 

[JackSlater]

If Finland has 4 elite players on a national team, which is possible because Finland has an excellent development program, Canada should still outnumber them with elites 25-4, unless Canada isn't developing the sheer talent as well as it could.

Canada can ice a team with 25 elite players very easily. So... I guess we agree. The development system in Canada can still improve, but it still churns out better players than any other development system for the time being.

 

[Macman]

If Finland has 4 elite players on a national team, which is possible because Finland has an excellent development program, Canada should still outnumber them with elites 25-4, unless Canada isn't developing the sheer talent as well as it could.

Canada does. It just won back-to-back worlds with two almost entirely different rosters. There were only three returnees. No other country has the depth to manage this. I think where you're off is the suggestion that a country like Finland only produces four elites and that Canada should mop the floor every time. The top countries in the world can produce 25-man rosters that can more than compete with Canada's top 25. It's beyond that where Canada separates itself.