There was no doubt some difficulty in throwing together a team of all-stars, but the problem was minimized somewhat by using intact lines from the two most dominant NHL teams of the era - the Montreal Canadiens and New York Islanders. From the standpoint of the Soviets, I believe that it was the best Soviet performance of all time. The passion, intensity and fight of the Soviet team was unparalleled before or after the Challenge Cup series.
The first game was a flat effort by the Soviets. Only the Golikov-Golikov-Makarov line played well throughout the game. Petrov's troika did score one PP goal and later nearly scored on 2-on-2, but that's about it. The impressive thing was that they were able to turn the tables and even dominate game 2 (shots on goal 31-16 for the USSR). They also lost Kharlamov in game 1 and Vladimir Golikov after game 2, and so had to juggle lines, and in that sense too game 3 was a terrific performance, and maybe the best game defensively that the Soviet national team played ever, as the NHL All-Stars had very little good scoring chances. However, I still think that the team and the performance that they had at the 1979 World Championship was even a little bit better. The Soviet team and performance in the 1981-82 season was comparable too. Very well-balanced teams.
In any case, I think the Challenge Cup games are still fun to watch; they have a good pace, and there's a lot of 'coast to coast' action. Maybe the unfortunate thing is that in none of the games are
both teams at the top of their game, which maybe prevents them from being all-time classics, like the 1987 Canada Cup final games.