Ozo, Namejs, ya'll jealous?
There was a time when there was an intense competition going on between Latvia and Belarus, but that was back in the 90s/early 00s.
I usually get fired up when someone talks like that about the Latvian national team, but this guy is so out of touch, I don't even know where to start. I'm mostly confused right now, to be honest.
First of all, I truly don't know anyone in Latvia who would be jealous of Belarus, and, in fact, most people in Latvia bring up Belarus as an example of what path not to take in terms of developing our hockey programme. It's a team that has always relied on import players. We diverged from that same path in the 90s, when we also had a bunch of non-Latvian Soviet-born players (such as the now-head coach of the Russian national team Znaroks, etc.), but we focused on developing local players and have never looked back.
I can't really imagine myself cheering for a team that was mostly comprised of mercenaries, which is the case with Italy, Belarus and a couple of other countries.
But let's ignore that for a moment. What specifically should we be jealous of? We've been ranked higher than Belarus in the IIHF rankings more often than not. We've made the Olympics 16 years in a row. You haven't.
Half of our key players don't even want to play in the World Champs anymore, because the tournament has lost some of its prestige and its being reflected in TV ratings as well, so every year now recently we're sending a bunch of our B team players to take part. And yet we haven't been demoted from the Elite tier since we clinched the promotion in 1996. That's 20 years. Some of our players weren't even born back then. Only 6 other national teams have a longer streak going.
Belarus played against such hockey powerhouses as Belgium and the Netherlands as recently as 2004.
All of our national teams (men's NT, U-20, U-18) are playing in the Elite tier. You're playing a tier below at the junior level (both U-20 and U-18). No imports there.
We've had 9 NHL draftees since 2010, and there's more coming. You've had a grand total of 1 NHL prospect in that same time frame.
By most indicators we're superior to Belarus while having 5x less material to work with (a population of 1.9M vs. 10M), and we don't even have a single import playing for our national team, yet we are the ones who should be jealous of something? Are you serious right now?
You would think that a country with a hockey-crazed dictator and more people than Sweden would do better than that.
)
