Why did the USSR catch up Canada so fast?

Psycho Papa Joe

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:handclap: Stalin was dead by the time Soviets played their first competative game and before you can even talk about any rivalry with Canada. :shakehead

The seeds to Russian hockey were definetly planted under Stalin in the mid to late 40's. While most Russians preferred Bandy at the time, he felt it was more important to gain a foothold in hockey because it was an Olympic Sport. His goals were to eventually use sport, particularily the Olympics, as a propangda tool to show how communism was the better system.
 

thomasincanada

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The Soviet Union first participated in the ice hockey World Championships in 1954. In 1972 they played the Super Series against Canada and the games showed that the Soviets had fully caught up Canada. By the late 1970s the Soviets were already ahead Canada and clearly the top hockey country in the world.

That's just your opinion.. They *did* have the best hockey team in the world because they trained and played together exclusively while all the Canadian talent was spread out amongst a lot of NHL teams. Does that make them the best hockey country? Did they have more overall talent than Canada?

Canada had guys come together sometimes for a few days perhaps long as a month that were expected to go out and play a team that was a real, permanent team. I think the results would have been different if guys like Bossy, Gretzky, Trottier, Lafleur etc trained and played on the same team all year round.

If Ovechkin, Malkin, Kovalchuk, Semin, etc played together year round right now I'd wager they would beat Canada every olympics.. would that make Russia a better hockey country than Canada?
 

Peter25

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Josif Stalin's son was one of the first "managers" (I don't know a better word for it) of Soviet hockey. He was managing the first Soviet hockey club, I think it's name was VVS. Viktor Tikhonov used to play for this club in the 1950's.
 

Peter25

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That's just your opinion.. They *did* have the best hockey team in the world because they trained and played together exclusively while all the Canadian talent was spread out amongst a lot of NHL teams. Does that make them the best hockey country? Did they have more overall talent than Canada?

This is a tired old argument. The Soviet national team did not practice together for "11 months". Around 50% of the national team players came from the Red Army team and the rest from various other teams, such as other Moscow teams Dynamo, Spartak and Soviet Wings, and regional teams such as Torpedo Gorky, Khimik Voskresensk and Traktor Chelyabinsk.

It was an advantage for the Soviet national team to have it's core to play in the Red Army. But to say they were not on par with Canada because of this is ridiculous. The results clearly show that the Soviet national team was always as good as any team Canada could ice after 1970.

During a brief period from 1978 to 1983 or 1984 the Soviets were also ahead of Canada, because at this time many of the great players from 1970s were still on their primes and the new KLM generation was breaking out.

Canada had always more depht than the Soviets because of their hockey resources. Even during the peak years of Soviet hockey there were only few rinks in the whole country, and the sport was concentrated on just a few cities, mainly to Moscow. Canada always had more players, more rinks, more equipment and more money allocated for hockey than the Soviet Union.

Where the Soviets excelled was the scientific approach to the game. The Soviets understood the game better than Canadians, and were able to develop talent from less resources more efficiently than Canada.
 
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KingGallagherXI

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:handclap: Stalin was dead by the time Soviets played their first competative game and before you can even talk about any rivalry with Canada. :shakehead

Stop saying silly things. The hockey development didn't start in the Soviets first competition. Poof, the USSR magically has a hockey team! No development, no planning! Nice magic thinking. Great post.

Point is Stalin had a plan to use sports as a propaganda tool and that included hockey, long before the Soviets became a hockey force.
 

Peter25

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Stop saying silly things. The hockey development didn't start in the Soviets first competition. Poof, the USSR magically has a hockey team! No development, no planning! Nice magic thinking. Great post.

Point is Stalin had a plan to use sports as a propaganda tool and that included hockey, long before the Soviets became a hockey force.

This is partially true. Soviet hockey program started in the late 1940s after the WWII. The first Soviet hockey players were bandy players who switched from bandy to hockey. The Soviet Union had a tradition in bandy before war and this helped them greatly to develop their hockey.

By the way, bandy is still very popular in Russia. It might actually draw bigger crowds than KHL overall. It is popular especially in Siberia. One regular Russian league bandy game can draw 30,000 people in places such as Arkhangelsk and Irkutsk, even if temperature is minus 30 degrees in Celsius.
 

thomasincanada

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It was an advantage for the Soviet national team to have it's core to play in the Red Army. But to say they were not on par with Canada because of this is ridiculous. The results clearly show that the Soviet national team was always as good as any team Canada could ice after 1970.

I never said they weren't on par.. you were the one talking about Russia superiority.

In my opinion it's an apples to oranges comparison. Canada was producing players to excel in the NHL while the soviets were building a superior international team.
 

Peter25

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I never said they weren't on par.. you were the one talking about Russia superiority.

In my opinion it's an apples to oranges comparison. Canada was producing players to excel in the NHL while the soviets were building a superior international team.

USSR was never "superior" to Canada and Canada was never "superior" to USSR .

But the USSR had an edge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and their national team was better than any team Canada could ice during those years.
 

DisgruntledGoat*

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If we're going to consider the Challenge Cup, then shouldn't we also include the Red Army's 1976 tour of the NHL?

That would include their new year's eve tied game against the Canadiens (where they were dramatically outplayed everywhere except in net), and their 4-1 beating at the hands of the Flyers.
 

VMBM

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Just a couple of points, although these type of threads always get a bit long-winded, with no one backing down...

There ain't no one convincing me that Challenge Cup was something similar to an NHL All-Star game. NHL All-Stars didn't take it very seriously? Passed-up hit opportunities? Is it really just a coincidence that Kharlamov was injured after a Larry Robinson hit (off-camera but mentioned by Irvin and Orr during the pre-game analysis for g2) at the end of the 1st game? And how about Vladimir Golikov, who had scored 2 key goals in the series, getting injured in the 2nd? Looks just too convinient to me. Barry Beck hit Skvortsov so hard on the boards that his helmet popped off and he laid on the ice for a few worrying moments.

NHL's line-up in the 1st game:
Dryden
Robinson - Salming
Savard - Beck
McDonald - Perreault - Sittler
Barber - Clarke - Gainey
Lafleur - Dionne - Shutt
Bossy - Trottier - Gillies
Hedberg, Nilsson

Guys like Potvin and Lapointe were added later... anyway, someone seriously trying to claim that these players were total strangers to one another? Also, USSR had to juggle their lines and put newcomers like Tyumenev and Gimaev in there due to those aforementioned injuries. And like Peter25 said, Tretiak was lousy in the first 2 games; that is the reason why he didn't play in the 3rd game.

I have no trouble believing that Stanley Cup was more important to the NHLers than the Challenge Cup. Just like the world championships meant more to the Soviets. Touché. I do agree that the series should have been a bit more carefully organized, but hey, NHL went for it and got burned.
Anyway, the hockey was pretty fast-paced and good IMO.

In the 2nd and especially in the 3rd game, NHL All-Stars hardly even got many great scoring chances, and I think the Soviet defence - for once - deserves a little credit. In the 1978-79 season, the Soviet national team definitely reached a peak never seen before (agreed by basically everyone who has seen games from that period and before), for example, beating their old nemesis Czechoslovakia 11-1 and 6-1 in the 1979 World Championships. Challenge Cup is just a part of the story - though the most familiar one to North Americans. And while it is easy to bring up Lake Placid in 1980, that game vs. USA was their only loss between 1978 and 1983 that had any significance. Not a bad record.
 
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VMBM

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If we're going to consider the Challenge Cup, then shouldn't we also include the Red Army's 1976 tour of the NHL?

That would include their new year's eve tied game against the Canadiens (where they were dramatically outplayed everywhere except in net), and their 4-1 beating at the hands of the Flyers.

In that case, shouldn't we also include, say, the 1985-86 Super series, when CSKA beat Edmonton 6-3 and that season's SC champions, Montreal, 6-1? The latter especially being one of the most one-sided affairs that you could ever imagine.

But the thing is that Red Army/CSKA never had the depth of the best Soviet national teams*, and I, for one, would never claim that CSKA was the best team ever.

* well, in the late 1980s, they almost might have had
 
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McGuillicuddy

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There ain't no one convincing me that Challenge Cup was something similar to an NHL All-Star game.

Meh. Whatever. And to counter, nobody is going to convince me or most Canadians that the Challenge Cup was something similar to a Canada Cup or modern (98 and later) Olympics.
 

Nalyd Psycho

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Is it really just a coincidence that Kharlamov was injured after a Larry Robinson hit (off-camera but mentioned by Irvin and Orr during the pre-game analysis for g2) at the end of the 1st game?

Given that it's Larry Robinson we're talking about, him half assing a body check is like the second best hitter ever going all out...
 

Peter25

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Meh. Whatever. And to counter, nobody is going to convince me or most Canadians that the Challenge Cup was something similar to a Canada Cup or modern (98 and later) Olympics.

This is because you lost. Had you won this "Series of the Century" it would be compared to 1972 Super Series.
 

Fredrik_71

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USSR population in 1970 - approx 250 million

Canada population in 1970 - approx 20 million

If Obama came out tomorrow and said that the US becoming the best hockey playing country in the world was a major priority, it would happen.

It would take some time, but with far greater resources and population to draw from the US could take over the sport.

This. The way canada still dominates hockey can be tributed to the fact that canada is the only nation 100% committed to hockey. If e.g. USA would commit they would blow away the rest of the world in a generation. The same reasoning can be made concerning the original 6 teams. The competition to play in a O6 team was fierce but the talent pool to draw from was tiny. Of course it was hard to qualify.

//Cheers
 

Kshahdoo

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In USSR hockey was always much less popular than football. And there were so many other sports (mostly olympic ones) considered important. While canadiens were always hockey-first-all-other-far-behind nation...

But we were lucky with all those stars in 70s-80s. And perhaps with a training system. Which, alas, isn't suited to modern russian lifestyle...
 

doakacola*

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This is because you lost. Had you won this "Series of the Century" it would be compared to 1972 Super Series.

Please tell me where the USSR ranked in hockey in 1960 Peter. It seems by 1960 the USSR was close to on par with Canada. If they were close to on par, how on earth could they lose in 1960 to essentially a group of part time amateur hockey players.
Probably one of the 3 best (if not best) forwards on the US team was a full time insurance broker. Peter if the USSR was so great, explain losing TWICE IN SIX OLYMPICS to part time or NCAA players? You seriously think a Canadian All-Star team would lose twice to US teams like that? Haha, ANSWER THE QUESTION PETER!! Don't ignore this question. USSR losing twice to USA from 1960-80 eliminates them from being considered the best, period.
 

Felonious Python

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To me, the way the Soviets caught up (and sometimes exceeded Canada) so quickly was largely due to their methodical approach to sport.

You have to consider that 'training camp' in the NHL for decades was just that. Players would come into camp out of shape, and they were there to try to get themselves into playing condition. Now, it's well expected that the players maintain their fitness year-round.

The NHL and Canada let themselves go, and they got beat by fitter competition.

Areas where the NHL/North American game had stagnated, the USSR took advantage.
 

Mr Kanadensisk

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Canada never had a national team program for its best players, so to use international hockey results as a measuring stick is automatically going to favour the Soviets. Like it or not the Soviets had all of their top players concentrated on 3 or 4 club teams, all of which were based in Moscow. The Soviet national teams had tonnes of practice time and tournament experience behind them and the Canadian teams with NHLers never had either. The fact that the Canadians were able to beat a full time Soviet national team four out of five times (72, 76, 81, 84, 87) shows in the big picture how far ahead Canada actually was.
The same is true when you consider club results. If the Soviet's top players are all concentrated into 3 or 4 clubs you are not comparing apples to apples if they face off against the NHL with 20 or more teams.
In the five NHL seasons following the collapse of communism, when basically any Russian who could get a job in the NHL came over, the most Soviet trained players to finish in the top 30 scorers was 3. Not bad, but far from dominant.
 
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Jumptheshark

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I dispute the base of your theory that they were behind us. THe USSR were a dominating european team and they put the boots to nearly every team/ country over here

It is Canadian arrogance that believes Canada was always the best country in the world for hockey game
 

Mr Kanadensisk

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It is Canadian arrogance that believes Canada was always the best country in the world for hockey game

Canada is the only country where hockey is by far the most popular sport and historically we have always had many more rinks and players than any other country, although the US are catching up lately.
 

finchster

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I looked over this thread briefly and I didn’t see anyone mentioned the Soviets played bandy. I wouldn’t say soviet hockey started from scratch, they played and still play a hockey like game on ice.

Some early Soviet hockey players were bandy players who learned hockey rules. The Soviets always had good skaters and stick handlers because of this game, it wasn’t building new talent for a sport some hockey like talent there.

It would be like if the USA said they wanted to become the best rugby nation in the world, the American football talent and infrastructure could make that happen in 10-20 years.
 

Jumptheshark

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Canada is the only country where hockey is by far the most popular sport and historically we have always had many more rinks and players than any other country, although the US are catching up lately.

well as a Canadian living in europe I have been all over many countries and in the scandanavian countries there are lots and lots of arenas
 

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