The US males’s Olympic hockey staff goes to enter the event in Italy subsequent month as a medal contender. It’s a excellent staff on paper, and among the finest they’ve ever despatched to the Olympics.
The issue is the roster is inferior to it could possibly be, or maybe must be, because the mind belief behind it continued to get caught in the identical outdated mindset that has restricted them in so many best-on-best tournaments.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 largest difficulty the People have in these tournaments is that they’ll by no means rating sufficient targets in crucial video games when the competitors is at its finest. It occurs repeatedly. Up to now, a shallow expertise pool was straightforward in charge 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 a substitute of merely taking their finest, most gifted gamers, they proceed to attempt to construct their roster like it’s an NHL staff with NHL constraints. As a substitute of taking prime goal-scorers like Jason Robertson (Dallas Stars), Cole Caufield (Montreal Canadiens) and Alex DeBrincat (Detroit Red Wings) for this 12 months’s staff, 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.
Staff USA roster snubs making administration look unhealthy
Whereas probably the most controversial inclusions on the roster, particularly Miller and Trocheck, proceed to wrestle for a Rangers staff that is without doubt one of the worst within the NHL, among the greatest snubs are shining.
On Friday night time, Robertson scored his thirtieth purpose of the season for Dallas. That not solely retains him atop the goal-scoring checklist amongst American-born gamers, nevertheless it additionally ties him for second in your entire NHL. His omission stays some of the gorgeous ones since NHL gamers began enjoying within the Olympics on the 1998 Nagano video games.
On Saturday, Caufield recorded a hat trick to present him 29 targets on the season. That places him into the highest 5 in your entire NHL. He and fellow Staff USA snub, defenseman Lane Hutson, additionally simply placed on a present this previous week in opposition to the Minnesota Wild, teaming up for a spotlight reel game-winning purpose within the third interval. Wild basic supervisor Invoice Guerin can be the overall supervisor for Staff USA and had a front-row seat for it.
Together with these performances, DeBrincat additionally scored his twenty seventh purpose of the season on Saturday night time 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 on account of a scarcity of goal-scoring, they’ll have some severe inquiries to reply.
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