It's obviously not "less fair" to put a team at a slight disadvantage than to eliminate it altogether.
Slight?
In 2002 Slovakia was put into qualifying with "minnow" hockey countries and didn't make it through with their thinned roster, guys either unable to play or being shuttled across North America.... then a mere three months later they won the world championship while none of those other teams even made the semi-finals. Not only did Slovakia outpace their fellow Olympic qualifying countries at the Worlds, but also rosters of other established nations which while not fully stocked, were still much better than the rosters of those other countries that had to go through Olympic qualifying. This leads me to the pretty logical conclusion that Slovakia got hosed by the Olympic qualifying process.
The "qualifying" that takes place for a World Cup tournament is the data gleaned from prior international competition and how established players of these countries are in their respective leagues. The hockey hierachy is fairly clear at this point. You can say that's flawed... but clearly an actual qualifying process can be flawed too and it would be silly to say otherwise. I'm confident in which one produces more accurate results in determining better teams.
What a stupid reasoning. I guess in 2002 they should have made Sweden play the semi-final disirregardless of the actual result on the ice. What kind of uninteresting tournament is that where they allow Belarus to knock out better teams?
An "uninteresting tournament" that had one terrible semi-final and an equally terrible bronze medal game. When Belarus beat Sweden, did you think that this was an upstart country on the rise who had a legitimate chance of establishing hockey supremacy? Or did you think that they were a team that merely caught lightning in a bottle and would be exposed in the next (two) game(s)? As a Canadian, seeing Canada win at the Olympics with NHLers for the first time was an amazing experience, but that semi-final against Belarus is the least memorable part of it. Belarus's upset over Sweden made for a great moment, sure, but the tournament on the whole would have been better if Slovakia was in it instead.
I'm not bothered by the fact that the Olympics has 12 twelve teams, but I also know you can cut the tournament down to 8 and it makes the quality of play stronger. It's been twelve years since that Belarus upset over Sweden, and in that time ZERO of these cinderella teams have made it into even the semi-finals of the Olympic tournaments. And in 13 WHC since the Belarus upset, outside of the eight World Cup teams I'd propose having, only ONCE has a team outside that group made the final 4 (Germany in 2010). Are any of these other countries loaded with players dominating in the NHL & top European leagues?
If you have a World Cup with players from all major leagues available, and have Canada/USA/Russia/Sweden/Finland/Czech/Slovakia/Swiss as the participants, the winner will be a legitimate world champion, I have no doubt of that.
