But then we are back to the scenario aquaregia mentioned, where nobody is going to bother to organize these friendlies at all because what's the point of playing the team you score on/can score on you at will? And that's not considering how likely, for example, Serbia vs Bosnia friendly game is politically.
OGQ games provide a pretty solid point of reference. GB defeated China 10-1 and Serbia 11-0. And keep in mind that's without any real incentive to run up the score.
Ok, that was higher than expected but it is something that could be tried for maybe one year because relegation and promotion work that way (top teams goes to elite divison and last place gets relegated to div 2a).
This doesn't solve the issue I listed. You can see it with pretty much every nation that has used naturalized players. They play for it as long as they benefit either financially or at least in terms of exposure. Seeing how hard it is to attract players to play for them in the WC, what incentive is there for Sikura brothers to represent Japan? Other than getting paid, which is then again, a bidding war, not a national team. Look no further than the Chinese Olympic team.
Some countries like exactly Japan do not hand out passports like candy, the IIHF would have to abolish all nationality requirements and even then I don't think that the JIHF would be eager to select them or any other non-nationals.
You can‘t have double citizenship in japan right? If so of course none of these canadians would want to give up their canadian /us passport which is understandable
I guess your right. I could see the motivation of playing internationaly as normally you don‘t get paid for playing on the NT but these naturalized players porbably do. In my opinion 1-3 such players don‘t have a huge impact because the rest has still be brought up by the country itself which helps smaller nations who lack the players and infrastructure to be more competitive but what you said is valid. I probably just like the idea of making teams more competitive but ofc it can stop the development of the country. But as a swiss i can say we‘ve also had our fair share of imports on the NT (Ryan Gardner and so on) when weren‘t the nation that we are now and it has helped to grow interest in the sport by getting better results with the NT. But Switzerland was not at the same point japan is right now so the argument of stopping developing the sport is valid.
got curious enough to have a skim through their public accounts for 20/21 and 21/21...
I always build in some sporty aspect to my European trips. I got to spend a little time inside a rink in Reykjavík this summer, and then kinda busted into the Stavanger Oilers fan shop. Would love to hang out in one of the lower level senior/U20:tournaments.
I go to the tournaments in Lithuania which, if you account for U20/U18 levels as well, is almost every year these days.
Feels a bit like barking at the wrong tree. While I agree that there is an excessive amount of bitching going on on these boards, in this case the reasons for it are well-founded and mostly come from the people who support the nations playing at this level.
