Oh boy, have a cookie, will you?
Did I say he was THE top player? Obviously Kharlamov (at least) had surpassed him at that point. However, if you're going to tell me he wouldn''t have been an asset to the team (yes, still), I say it is you who is talking nonsense. Just under 1.5 years previously [at the 1971 World Championships] he had been the top scorer and was chosen as the best forward; did he really get so bad so quickly? But I guess since I don't have any footage from the 1972 Olympics, I just have to trust your word that he was 'awful'
Anyway, I'm 100 % sure he would have performed better than Vikulov in the Summit series. And no matter how good Maltsev (who BTW benefited immensely from playing on the same line with Firsov in the early '70s) was at this point,
his performance in the Summit series wasn't anything special; could not even score a single goal, even though showed some good playmaking at times. And what was your point anyway? Having Firsov on the team doesn't mean that Alexander Maltsev does not get to play. Of course, there is always a possibility that - much like Starshinov in the lone game he played or F. Mahovlich for Team Canada - Firsov would have looked like 'man out of time', so to speak. We will never know.
What gave me the idea that USSR would have done better if coached by Tarasov? Er, just common sense, you know...
are you gonna tell me that Bobrov as a coach was anything near of Tarasov's caliber, or that the players (many of them 'discovered' by Tarasov) preferred Bobrov? I'm sure some of them appreciated the new-found 'freedom' under Bobrov, but something just tells me that Tarasov would have gotten more out of that team, especially when things started to go rough.
Irek Gimayev...
It's true that on the Soviet national team, he seemed to play at least as much offense as defense, though interestingly he is listed only as defenseman on Chidlovski's 'Hockey CCCP International' site (
http://www.chidlovski.net/1954/54_player_info.asp?p_id=g003). However, him being placed on a line together with Makarov and Tyumenev does not sound very ideal situation to me, as those players very likely had never REALLY played together before; I think Gimayev was playing his 1st game for the national team and Tyumenev his 2nd (the 1st was the g2 of the series on the top line with Mikhailov and Petrov). And alas, the Gimayev-Makarov-Tyumenev line was undoubtedly 'the worst' Soviet line of the game; they still might have outperformed their NHL counterparts, though...