It's nice that this tournament is important to Europeans.
Because it is a D or E level tournament (Jamal Mayers!?!?) it really doesn't do anything for me at all. As well, the number of international tournaments has really watered things down and made the World Championships relatively meaningless to me.
Well I can agree that World Championships most likely would be better if was held every 4:th year, in countercycle with the Olympics.
But I fail the one World Championship per year and one Olympic every 4:th can be considered 'watering things down'.
It's basicly the same for every other sport all around the world. They have one international championship per year.
I suspect that, because European countries are small in comparison to Canada and the USA, and that there are so many of them close together, that this is why international hockey is more important than it is to North Americans.
It's true that it's only 3 timezones to deal with so it's not spread as wide (well 4 if Britain ever qualifies to group A
).
But counting only the 14 european countries in group-A there's actually more people in those 14 than Canada and US combined (some 390M vs 330M roughly, Canada is big, but there's not very many Canadians).
The difference that matters is actually NHL.
The league is so old, powerful and have so much history that it more or less equals hockey in NA (esp with the old silly amatuer rules in the Olympics).
It's been a bit of "why bother with international tournaments when we can buy all the best players and have them play here?".
But the majority of hockey audience and players (from kids and up) hasn't hardly seen a single NHL game in their life. Their big memories, their historic victories, their big parades are from world championships and olympics.
The euro leagues are picking up and getting more proffessional, the salaries go up, more and more players stay in europe. Accepting a lower salary, but still more than enough for a good and stable life.
I think that's why NHL mgmt is talking so sweetly to IOC and IIHF, they want to maximise their product, so they want the best players.