|
 |
|
|
April 04, 2003
Hockey World Cup Set For September 2004
The second World Cup of Hockey, that intermittent professional tournament that hasn't been played since 1996, will return in September 2004 at six venues across Europe and North America. The good news: that the tournament, a descendant of the Canada Cup, is being played at all; and NHL rules, rinks and refs -- forget the Olympics, this is the best ice hockey you'll ever see. Now the bad news: they've adopted the Olympic round-robin format, something that ratchets the tension down until every team reaches the elimination round; and the fact that it might be the last top-flight ice hockey that anyone will see in a long time as the NHL's Collective Bargaining Agreement expires right after the Cup's championship game. If you're living in Montreal, Toronto, St. Paul, Helsinki, Stockholm or Cologne, you really ought to make time for at least one of these games. I went to see the U.S. play Canada in the inaugural World Cup in Philadelphia, and it had to be one of the most exciting games I ever attended. There was tension (would Philly teammated Eric Lindos and John LeClair batter each other? The answer was yes). There was scoring (two goals by Brett Hull). And there was a great fight -- with Claude Lemieux and Keith Tkacuk dropping the gloves before the first faceoff. But that wasn't all. The best single game of the tournament might have been the Canada-Sweden semifinal, a game that wasn't decided until Theo Fleury ended it with a goal in the second overtime. To top it all off, Mike Richter led the U.S. to victory in game 3 of the championship series, defeating Canada on home ice at the Montreal Forum. Though little noticed in the States at the time, the defeat spurred Canada to revamp its Olympic Team, something that more or less led directly to their gold medal victory in Salt Lake City in 2002.
Eric
11:19 AM
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsPost a commentThanks for signing in, . (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |