The 98 czec team was neither that countires best, nor a top-20 all-time team. They werent even a top-3 team at the tournament. They were outplayed by everyone.
Haseks performance, however, was his greatest and among the greatest of all time.
I cannot disagree more. They were outplayed by which team? The Czechs easily
beat Finns (3-0), then Kazakhstan (8-2) and lost to the stucked Russian team in
a tight game, when they conceeded two bizarre goals early in the third period
(1-2). In the quarterfinals, the Americans came out really strong and Hašek put out
one of the greatest individual performances in recent Olympic history; apart from
the first period, though, the Czechs played a bright defensive game and were able
to create a lot of scoring chances (unlike Americans). They eventually won comfortably (4-1).
In the semifinals against Canada... well, I have watched this game about 500 times
on VHS. They were easily outplaying Canada for 50 minutes into the game. Big
kudos to Patrick Roy for his performance. Canada had NO scoring chance until
the Šlégr's goal. After that, the Czechs became too defensive minded and conceeded Linden's equalizer (deflected by ŠmehlÃk) just 63 seconds before
the end of the third period. During 10 minutes of overtime, Canada was better.
But the Czechs were clearly dominating for some 75% of the match. It was Roy's
game, not Hašek's.
In the finals, they had lots of scoring chances again, while Russia had one or two.
Unlike Canada, Russia wasn't able to create more offense after Czech leading goal
and was generally helpless in this game. Czech Republic should have won 3-0 or
4-0.
The Czech 98' team obviously didn't include so many star players as the later teams,
but it was playing much better overall game than our squads in Salt Lake City or
in Torino. Only a few stars (or players considered to be stars by overseas media...), but who cares? They played better than these stars from Canada, U.S.A. or Russia
and weren't outplayed by anyone.