A Canadian team made up of the most elite minor midget AAA players would probably be ranked mid 20's
Why not do a 32 team world cup?
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It wouldn't matter if Saudi Arabia threw billions of dollars into their own nationl team they wouldn't get anywhere unless some elite top 6 young players decided to become SA citizens.
Their current roster which is ranked 36th in the world up from 48th in 2019 due to an infusion of lesser former eastern bloc players.
Even France which has a total of 19000 registered players have their national team littered with players who have to go overseas to develop are ranked 14th.
Sure but that still doesn't mean that weaker teams are breaking into the Big clu or can compete with the top 5 except for a rare win here or there.
USA has seen a huge improvement but russia really hasn't gotten any better and I wonder where the improvement from them would come from?
Sure switzerland looked very promising about a decade ago and have seemed to plateaued where they are now,
I really doubt this unless or course the NHL expands and has a European division.
Exactly how does the draft system favour North Americans, what an odd thing to say.
You could say that the draft favours players paling in NA and that's why some of the top Europeans drafted actually play in a NA league on draft day.
That's nice but I don't really see how that its relevant to the discussion here for non Olympic countries and their young kids, sports is international and the best players tend to want to play in the best leagues.
since this 32 team stems out of the soccer example do you really think poor African soccer players don't dream of playing in the top leagues of the world?
Of course hockey will be different in that it's not generally poor kids playing the sport and the rich have always had more time for extravagant elitist dreams from which hockey in NA drew from in the early 20th century with hockey clubs basically being the playground of the rich and elite classes in large Canadian cities which then got spoiled with the evils of professionalism which obviously the rich didn't need.
Makes one wonder how high the Canadian and woman's teams would be ranked in the men's rankings eh?
Maybe they could be in the top 32.
frontsfan67
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Soccer has the biggest audience in the world- that’s why.
Hockey is probably the 4th biggest in North America behind basketball, baseball and football.
I’d like to see maybe a 12 or 16 team format but 32 is wayyy too big. Canada will beat those bottom teams by 100 and they’ll declare war on us lol.
Dirtyf1ghter
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I'm just telling you that if Saudi Arabia wants to hire the world's hockey elite to create a league at home, it can. And players coming.
Russia is getting stronger and stronger. Compared to 2014, the level of Russians in the NHL is higher and this will continue given the draft lists. Russia can do much better than now while Canada is at its ceiling.
CHL players, and by extension North American players, are scouted more often than Europeans. There are also European players who would have the level to play in the NHL instead of North Americans who play there. So when I see 29% of Europeans in the NHL and 43% of Europeans in the draft, that’s a sporting minimum. Just the statistical gap between those who make the NHL today and those selected to make it tomorrow, leads you to understand that we are taking the path to see more Europeans than North Americans in 20 years.
Afterwards I don't answer because your thinking is confused and incoherent.
Players come to play in the NHL for the money and it's the best league because it pays the most. If the KHL paid twice as much, NHL players would be in the KHL. It's that simple.
I know the Canadian nationalist narrative which wants to convince itself that if Canada is declining it is because hockey excludes the poor. But the reality is that Canada has never produced as many champions as in recent years. Canada is less represented in the NHL because other nations are progressing and better exploiting their potential. Russia has 4 times the demographics of Canada. USA 10 times so obviously, if these nations exploit their potential at the same intensity as Canadians, these nations will become better than Canada.
Faced with the rise in the level in America, Europe and Russia, Canada's share, already at its maximum potential, can only decline.
It will be closer and closer, so a 24-nation world championship is possible in the future. The gap between 1 and 24 will tighten to the same level as between 1 and 16 before.
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Nah, man... Unless the team is from some super beer league with ex pro players, they would get beaten.
This is a game of the 32nd ranked team, Croatia: Croatia - Israel | 2023 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship (Division II, Group A)
Obviously not the highest level of hockey in the World, but clearly better than the beer league teams I've seen with many dudes who can barely skate.
WarriorofTime
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What are you talking about? The Russian share of NHL games played was 6.2 % which is almost double where it was nine years prior at 3.2 %. There is tons of evidence that the "KHL Generation" has been very successful for Russia, how is it not better?
The 80s russian and the first wave of russian Nhlers was more elite than now and did better internationally IMO.
Sure they had a dip in NHLers for a while but they aren't getting better.
Dirtyf1ghter
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It's starting to get old. The Russian decline was in the 90s/00s.
It's like saying that Czechia and Slovakia are declining when the decline was during the 00s/10s, not now.
11.55% of players drafted this year. Best goalkeepers in the world, vastly better defenders than in the years 2000/10, more talented forwards. And recently a streak of spectacular forwards in the draft (Michkov, Demidov, Ryabkin).
If we rely on the latest drafts, we are on the basis of 90/100 Russians in the NHL (if 32 teams) in 10/5 years.
WarriorofTime
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The 80s were 40 years ago, lol. I've already showed how it is getting better compared to the dip that happened well before then.
I mean... sure everyone would prefer to make $10 million a year playing hockey as opposed to having a regular day job, but that's really abstract in most of the world of hockey. It has no meaningful connection to your own activity playing junior hockey and so on. More so with EA Sports video games if you're into that kind of thing.
Sure maybe but the point I was responding too was anecdotal in nature in the first place and no evidence has really been provided in a 32 team tournament that it would drive hockey interest in more countries.
I dare to venture that the soccer analogy just doesn't transfer that easily to hockey.
I think my point has been sidetracked as Russia has historically since the 70s been a hockey super power the notion that there would be growth just isn't backed up and more guys being picked as long shots in later rounds doesn't mean very much as maybe a handful every couple of years even comes over to the NHL.
Silky Johnson
I wish you all the bad things in life.
Too be fair, that is due to regional qualifying and Europe having too many competitive teams. They were well withing the top 32 teams and would have easily qualified if they were in a different region.
UEFA now has 16 spots and like 20+ teams that could qualify on a given year.
That being said, 16 teams seems like the very maximum for any hockey World Cup.
Max Milk
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This is why I said 24 teams is the absolute maximum. These are hockey federations who can at least be trusted to ice the best possible team of mid KHL/Euro league guys. You might get some blowouts but it wouldn't be 23-0. The opening day matches would at least resemble a real hockey game. And hey maybe once in a while you get a situation where that doesn't happen and one of these lowly teams steal a point. Anything can happen in a single hockey game.
After that things ramp up real fast. And the top teams are facing top 10 nations within a few games. Honestly I think it would be a solid summer tournament.
Maybe even cut it down to 20 and leave teams like China, Japan, Korea & Poland off. But at some point, if you want it to be a "World Cup" and not a "North Atlantic Cup" you're going to have to start including at least Asia.
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Korea is ranked 22nd in the world right now and has 3684 players and were relegated from the second to 3rd tier this year and can't really compete with the top teams in the top division.
Japan with a much longer hockey history and close to 20000 players is ranked 24 and was 5th out of 6 teams in that same divison and the top 4 teams were from europe so asian teams are in for a rough climb and some World cup of hockey isn't really going to help if the Olympics didn't.
Max Milk
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And this is where we start to talk about eligibility rules...
I don't think anyone cares whether the entire Japanese national ice hockey team learned to play hockey in Japan or not.
Open up the eligibility rules. You don't have to go full World Baseball Classic with it, but I feel like being born in the country or holding that country's citizenship should suffice.
All of a sudden some of these lesser teams start looking "not so shitty".
I don't think anyone cares whether the entire Japanese national ice hockey team learned to play hockey in Japan or not.
Open up the eligibility rules. You don't have to go full World Baseball Classic with it, but I feel like being born in the country or holding that country's citizenship should suffice.
All of a sudden some of these lesser teams start looking "not so shitty".
Given that Japan for one doesn't even recognise dual citizenship that wouldn't change anything. Instead we might see certain Arabic states with a bunch of Russian legionnaires.
Max Milk
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Well then perhaps 20 teams is preferable in that case since other non-European countries like the UAE, Australia or Israel are ranked way too low.
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Which is already happening with the UAE (and some others, like Georgia).
Indeed, and without eligibility rules beyond passport they could just hire a pro team of their choosing. Handball had their own shitshow when Qatar first bought a World Championship tournament and then assembled a team with top players from around the world. Made the final though barely lost to France. The Qatari team even included a player that had been a part of the previous French gold-winning team four years earlier.
Hamilton Bulldogs
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Payback for all those years Ivan Koloff competed for Russia, despite being a Canadian.
Yeah, I raised an eyebrow at that comment, too, but I get their point. If your beer league tiers, look at who is on the top level. They're former junior B/AAA players, and they're better than the Israel/Croatia players in the video linked.
Can you make a gigantic, 32-team affair and avoid blowouts? As some have already mentioned, I think you COULD re-jig the IIHF tournament to allow for each tier to immediately graduate into the following tier (the winner of each tier playing in the subsequent tournament)... I'm not sure what the benefit would be. If this is something that'd make hockey more exciting, meaningful, and inclusive to the lower-tiered nation fanbases, I'm all for it. I don't know that it would. Essentially, the World Cup of soccer works that way, but nobody really feels like they're "in it" until after the qualification phase.
