Is 4 Nations a “Best on Best”?

[Gerulaitis]

To be fair, Czechoslovakia never had a true ‘A’ team at any of Canada Cups in the 1980’s. Same for Soviet Union in ‘76 and ‘91.

This is interesting. I perfectly remember most of the their players from those days. Pasek, Hrdina, Benak, Ruzicka, Volek...The coolest name was VLK (I think it means "wolf")

Which top players were missing in the 1980s? Maybe Nedomansky ? Klima and Pivonka in 87? Bubla?

Peter Stastny would have been a great addition. But he chose Canada

 

[JackSlater]

I always find it quite annoying when people reduce the Czech success of Nagano to just Hasek. Yes, Hasek was the best goalie around at that time, and I think he was pretty much responsible for the quarter final win against the US, I'll give you that. The Czechs won 4-1, but in the first period they played poorly and the US was far superior. Yet the US only scored once and led 1-0 after that period. Without Hasek the US would have put the game beyond the Czechs in the first 20 minutes.

But against Canada the Czechs were the better team. Hasek obviously contributed, but the team overall was better and Canada was extremely lucky to get to overtime. They scored a very flukey goal a minute and a bit before the end. The only game that was unbalanced in the whole tournament for the Czechs where the goalie really won it for them was against the US. The shots on goal reflected how good both America and Hasek were - 39-19 shots on goal for the Americans. Of course, the Czechs still had to score and they did it four times (no empty-netter), but Hasek was THE key. In the other games he performed brilliantly as well, but so did the whole team. Shots on goal in the semi final and final were completely balanced (the Czechs outshot Canada 31-30 and Russia 21-20, so basically even, and the stats reflected the balance of play between the teams). In round robin, they beat Finland 3-0 and outshot them 29-17, Kazakhstan 8-2 (45-23) and lost to Russia 1-2 (24-31). It was a fantastically put together team with Hasek being a key performer, but also very much part of a fantastic team set-up. The number of times Canadians have told me "your guys only beat us because of Hasek!". If an American said that to me, I can't disagree. But nobody from the countries of the other Czech opponents in Nagano.

This is true, things get simplified and then the big picture is lost. Hasek gets all the credit but things played out as you said. Against Canada the Czechs were better, as in the skaters, for the first 55 minutes of the game. They generally outplayed Russia in the gold medal game too. This does not mean that Hasek was short of excellent, but it is not accurate to put it all on Hasek.

The same thing happens with Buffalo and the 1999 playoffs. Hasek is the best goaltender ever so he MUST have carried Buffalo. People don't care that as crappy as Buffalo's offence generally was, it was the best offensive team (goals per game and consistency) in the playoffs until the finals. Must have been Hasek, who was indeed excellent, all on his own.

We saw a lot of Czech success post 1998 and Hasek certainly was not around for all of it.