snarktacular
Registered User
- Aug 2, 2005
- 20,525
- 182
Part of the reason why the "lesser" European teams do better than expected on paper is because they often play together. And in the Olympics and World Championships, they form the team ahead of time and do some practices etc to form a team.It's well documented that Slovakia isn't churning out nearly as much talent as they used to. I don't see the relevance to stats from 5 years ago. For whatever reason they've hit a major bump in the development road.
Other than Tatar I don't see one promising young player for them. I realize Chara and Hossa (Gaborik too) have had great careers but they are closing in on 40 by the time 2016 rolls around. So I'd be extremely surprised if they could be competitive if they had their own team. They'd be icing guys that are career European league players against NHL all stars. At least with Team Europe they'll be able to put an entire team of NHL players out there making it way more fun to watch
Will there be some kind of warmup/practice time? If not then Team Europe will be at a disadvantage.
But in the end there couldn't be more esoteric teams because I think this is only for NHLers (it seems like a venture between the NHL NHLPA, to keep the IIHF out of it). Are there enough ____ players to fill all positions? Answer is probably no.