The USA males’s Olympic hockey group goes to enter the match in Italy subsequent month as a medal contender. It’s a excellent group on paper, and probably the greatest they’ve ever despatched to the Olympics.
The issue is the roster is not so good as it could possibly be, or maybe needs to be, because the mind belief behind it continued to get caught in the identical outdated mindset that has restricted them in so many best-on-best tournaments.
The most important difficulty the People have in these tournaments is that they will by no means rating sufficient objectives in a very powerful video games when the competitors is at its finest. It occurs repeatedly. Previously, a shallow expertise pool was straightforward responsible for no less than a part of that.
That’s not the case because the American expertise pool is deeper than it has ever been, however administration refuses to completely faucet into it.
As an alternative of merely taking their finest, most proficient gamers, they proceed to attempt to construct their roster like it’s an NHL group with NHL constraints. As an alternative of taking high goal-scorers like Jason Robertson (Dallas Stars), Cole Caufield (Montreal Canadiens) and Alex DeBrincat (Detroit Red Wings) for this 12 months’s group, they took function gamers and “glue guys” like New York Rangers teammates J.T. Miller and Vincent Trocheck.
They regarded like unhealthy selections on the time. These selections proceed to look worse because the Olympics get nearer.
Crew USA roster snubs making administration look unhealthy
Whereas probably the most controversial inclusions on the roster, particularly Miller and Trocheck, proceed to battle for a Rangers group that is likely one of the worst within the NHL, among the largest snubs are shining.
On Friday evening, Robertson scored his thirtieth objective of the season for Dallas. That not solely retains him atop the goal-scoring listing amongst American-born gamers, however it additionally ties him for second in the complete NHL. His omission stays probably the most beautiful ones since NHL gamers began taking part in within the Olympics on the 1998 Nagano video games.
On Saturday, Caufield recorded a hat trick to offer him 29 objectives on the season. That places him into the highest 5 in the complete NHL. He and fellow Crew USA snub, defenseman Lane Hutson, additionally simply placed on a present this previous week towards the Minnesota Wild, teaming up for a spotlight reel game-winning objective within the third interval. Wild common supervisor Invoice Guerin can also be the final supervisor for Crew USA and had a front-row seat for it.
Together with these performances, DeBrincat additionally scored his twenty seventh objective of the season on Saturday evening for the Pink Wings. That additionally locations him within the top-10 within the league.
All of which means as of Saturday, 5 of the top-10 goal-scorers within the NHL are American-born gamers.
Solely two of them (Tage Thompson of the Buffalo Sabres and Matt Boldy of the Wild) are on the Olympic roster.
There isn’t a strategy to sugarcoat how unhealthy that appears for the American team-building course of. Administration higher hope they win, as a result of in the event that they lose as soon as once more resulting from an absence of goal-scoring, they’ll have some severe inquiries to reply.
