By the way, since the 1979 Challenge Cup was mentioned here, I found this article.
Soviet Six Routs N.H.L. Stars, 6‐0
It's the NY Times. Soviet won 6-0.
Some quotes (my bolding):
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"holding the N.H.L. scoreless over the last 1½ contests. The N.H.L. players were limited to only 31 shots the last 94 minutes."
"quite clearly, the
N.H.L. players could not move as quickly as the Russians, they
could not pass as well as a team and they
could not protect the puck"
"The Russians repeatedly stole the disk with a clever technique in which they lifted the N.H.L. stars’ sticks and then quickly scooped away the free puck. Nbthing like that had ever happened to the N.H.L. players when they had learned this game as children."
"60 minutes of swarming tactics by four efficient Soviet lines"
The two‐goal deficit seemingly enraged the N.H.L. stars, who reacted predictably — they
started slamming Soviet players into the boards
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I remember when Swedish players first played against NHL players, they were surprised by their lack of skill.
The Swedes found they were as good skaters, as good passers and as good technically. Tactically, the Canadian way appeared to be intimidation and rough play, rather than trying to outplay their opponent.
There's this ongoing myth among many North Americans that their hockey was so superior, when it actually wasn't, as the 1972 Summit Series showed. It's very logical. The Europeans (mainly Soviets, Swedes) have a long tradition of playing
bandy, a sport that favors skating, passing and positioning more than physical play. The Europeans also used larger ice hockey rinks, which even further helped them improve on these parts of the game.
The North Americans, however, played on small ice surface, with a small league (often) consisting of 6 teams playing each other over and over. They played their small rink physical play. My theory is that their game simply had
stagnated. That would be logical, as playing the same 5-6 teams over and over, season after season, might not be as developing as - like the Europeans - play games against players from another country and league.
Then Bobby Orr appeared, basically like a star forward playing defense, changing the North American game in a way few other had prior to him. Then the WHA came, and players like Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson showed the North Americans just how skilled and tactically developed European players were. (Bobby Hull said that he immediately found a chemistry with them, and it was wonderful getting to play with them the way they thought of hockey.) In the NHL, Salming had showed the way, and in NYI several Swedes played for their dynasty. Later, Gretzky arrived, with his more "European" way of thinking hockey. (Of course, Gretzky stood out in many other areas too.)
In Sweden, floorball is a popular sport (possibly bigger than ice hockey). Sweden has been world leading. Our women's national team went undefeated for probably more than a decade. We dominated hugely, with the men's team from Finland sometimes being able to beat us. Why did we dominate? Because we were "first" and had the most players to choose from. Just like ice hockey in Canada. But today, Finland is about as good as us. Our men's national team also sometimes lose to Switzerland. Why? Because the sport is getting bigger in those countries, just like ice hockey grew in countries like Soviet, Sweden and Czechoslovakia. It's absurd to believe that it would take several decades to catch up. If ice hockey would suddenly overtake association football as
the number one sport in the world, Canada's "tradition" wouldn't mean much. Within a couple of decades, we would see countries developing new ways of thinking and playing the game that we haven't seen today. Depending upon rink size and rules, even countries with physically smaller population (southern Europe, South America, Asia) might become very competitive.
(Floorball is said to have been introduced to Sweden by immigrants from Finland, so Finland probably should get credit too, and probably were the first nation to dominate the sport.)
The main thing Canada (and nowadays USA) has had going for them is population of players (or what it's called), i.e. the
number of ice hockey players to choose from. Logic says that they should be much deeper, and that the likelihood of producing stars should be much higher. Yet, when the Europeans entered the NHL in the early 1990s, they immediately showed they were basically as good, despite coming from "smaller" ice hockey countries. Forsberg, Lidstrom, Hasek, Jagr, Selanne, Bure, Fedorov, Sundin...
My current theory is that this shows that European hockey were great at developing world class hockey players, perhaps even better than Canada when looking at the amount of players to choose from.