Tournament without a dream – Kommersant

The next Ice Hockey World Championship, which starts on Friday, which is hosted by Finland and Latvia, will be held, like the previous championship, without the participation of the Russian team and, it seems, may well taxi to the usual ending in the form of the Finnish-Canadian final.

Before the tournament, the matches of which will be held in Tampere and Riga, those who are very worried about the shortage of gold medals in top competitions for the Russian team should experience especially acute pain, imagining what it could look like at this championship if the International Ice Hockey Federation suddenly cancels (IIHF) last year’s suspension.

The Russian team, trying to again get the gold of the world championship, which it had not had since 2014, always received at its disposal a good landing party from the NHL – in terms of both the number and quality of players: domestic stars, as a rule, did not ignore such invitations , flew out of America on the first call. But now it would be quite chic – it couldn’t be better. Moreover, he would have arrived all, entirely – to the location of the national team not “on the flag”, right before the opening of the competition, or already in the course of it, but in advance, in order to restore the tone, how to play well.

So it turned out that this spring in the NHL there was some kind of unprecedented Russian collapse. In fact, all the brightest domestic hockey players either flew past the playoffs or were cut off already in the first round, which ended more than a week ago.

In this Russian team, if she performed at the Finnish-Latvian championship, Alexander Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin, Nikita Kucherov and Artemy Panarin, Kirill Kaprizov and Vladimir Tarasenko, Mikhail Sergachev and Ivan Provorov, Igor Shesterkin and Andrey Vasilevsky could play together.

And the experts who make up all sorts of pre-launch ratings would certainly put this dream team at the top of the hierarchy without hesitation. If not now to return the gold, then when at all?

But the Russian team will not be at the World Cup, and a look at the applications of its participants persistently hints at the fact that you need to be ready for a completely familiar ending. The three previous championships were crowned by the same final, in which the Finnish and Canadian teams met. Canadians took over in 2021, Finns in 2020 and 2022. And there is no reason to consider a repetition of the scenario unlikely.

Formally, the national teams of Finland and Canada have three grand rivals. Well, three and a half, because the Swiss often manage to annoy the giants – the Swedes, the Czechs and the Americans, and their appearance not just in the playoffs, but in the stages more prestigious than the quarterfinal is no longer surprising.

So, none of these undisputed competitors looks like a team that has set its sights on hunting for a gold medal at all costs. The Czechs brought several good NHL players to the tournament – Karel Veimelka, Filip Khytil, Dominik Kubalik, but still they definitely lack depth and brightness. But veterans strongly over 30 – in abundance. The Swedes have eight hockey players from the NHL, but there are definitely no terrifying ones among them. The Americans, by tradition, didn’t give a damn about the medals in advance, staffed exclusively with young people, as well as characters who settled in the fourth links of their NHL teams or even farm clubs.

And only the Finns and Canadians meet, perhaps, their gold standards. The Finnish national team has in place most of the heroes of its fresh, that is, the current decade, take-off, which resulted in two victories at the world championships and the gold of last year’s Olympics in Beijing, including coach Jukka Jalonen and, apparently, the eternal 37-year-old forward giant Marko Anttila. And to help the European detachment – already contrary to tradition – this time a solid North American detachment was dispatched. In it, next to such good players as Yoel Armia, Kaapo Kakko, Kasperi Kapanen, there is, for example, Mikko Rantanen, who scored 55 goals for the Colorado Avalanche in the past NHL regular season.

And the Canadian team is a list, maybe not grandiose, but at least, as a rule, experienced and playing a lot of hockey players in their clubs, including hockey players with good statistics, like Tyler Toffoli, Cody Glass, Scott Loughton, Jack Quinn , Mackenzie Wigara, Milan Lucic.

And the addition of junior Adam Fantilli to him, the alleged second number of the future draft (everything is clear with the first one: no one can get around the phenomenon of Connor Bedard), looks quite organic and appropriate. Not a dream team, of course, but such strong and even, albeit without much brilliance at first glance, Canadian teams know how to win gold in a not too high level of competition without problems.

Alexey Dospekhov