OT: Nations Face-Off 2025
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Tkachuck would fight his mom if she was wearing a different jersey
With canada boo’ing the anthem I am praying a bunch of USA trolls show up with #25 jerseys with a name plate of “Tariff”. I say this as someone who thinks there shouldnt be a single tariff on earth but just for the pure trollery
Was just thinking about this.
But high end hockey players grow up playing international hockey, and for much of their development it is the highlight of their season.
No other NA sport really has that.
Do young soccer players play a lot of int'l tourneys?
This tourney transitions to Boston for the knock out rounds, so I'm sure the booing will be reciprocated.
Though I imagine the Canadian fans will travel well.
Edit: Just heard there is no knockout round. Just a round robin and a final.
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I was flipping through the channels recently (I think it was earlier this week) and the USA U-16 boys soccer team was playing someone….can’t remember who. It was 14-0 at halftime.
That was going to be another aspect of my post. NA sports can't even put together a 4 nations tourney where all 4 teams are pretty good.
Maybe the b-ball's?. I dunno.
How do you know that politics had anything to do with it? I am not saying that it didn't, it might have. I have not heard either way. I would think that a 6th team would be needed also. Who would that be AND would there have been enough time to play all the games in 2 weeks? Does the NHL stop the season for a longer amount of time for this? 2 weeks is long enough IMO. I need my Devils back.
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It's obvious what the main reason for Russia being excluded is, considering they are excluded from all IIHF tournaments as well. They wouldn't need to add a sixth team, they could just keep the same format and have everyone play one more game - four round robin games instead of three, and then top two play in the final. This would still make the tournament a few days longer though, and they want this to be as brief as possible, so that probably further enhanced their decision to exclude Russia.
Either way, I'm enjoying watching this tournament, but I always find these NHL-run international tournaments to be kinda lame compared to the IIHF's World Championships since instead of there being actual qualifying criteria with promotion and relegation, the NHL just handpicks which countries they deem worthy, and in their most recent World Cup to make it a round number, they made bogus teams like the North American 23U team and Team Europe. I was rooting for both of those teams to showcase how stupid it was. Imagine players from Canada and the US having to play against their own country in the final, and what anthem would they play if Europe won?
They're bringing the World Cup back in alternating two-year cycles with the Olympics, but at least this time they aren't bringing back those dumb artificial teams, and it's going to be in an actual set interval instead of randomly thrown in whenever they decide to run it (1996, 2004, 2016). This would be completely unnecessary though if the NHL didn't drag their season out for so long and would end before the World Championships like every other league in the world does. Then we'd have a real best-on-best international tournament every year, but of course the NHL is only concerned with what's best for the NHL and not what's best for hockey, so they run their playoffs during the World Championships, they go back and forth on allowing their players to represent their countries in the Olympics, and they run their own mediocre international tournaments as a watered down substitute. I'm skeptical that their ultimate goal for the reincarnation of the World Cup is to be a replacement for letting their players participate in the Olympics, even though that's what most of the fans and players want.
I enjoyed both games so far. The US-Finland game was pretty physical. Was glad to see that. This is so much better than the All-Star game.
Russia was banned because of Ukraine war.
For tourney with Russia:
- you could play with 5 countries
- you could add a 6th team of players from all countries not fully represented
US / Canada / Russia matchups are always classics !
The 6th team thing would be good for someone like Nico Hischier.
A mish-mash of players from all the non-represented countries only sounds good on paper. It's an honor to be chosen for a national team, it doesn't mean nearly as much to be picked for Team Other. Everyone else is playing for national pride and you're playing for the Island of Misfit Toys.
Bettman said on WednesdY that next World Cup of hockey won’t have a mishmash team - and only countries represented.
I’d say:
US
Fin
can
Swe
Rus
czech
Slovakia
Germany
Swiss
Will be the next itineration
The top four countries by player representation were included. You could go farther to 5 or 6...but how much time off from the regular NHL do you really want to take? And how lopsided would the games be. You can already see the Finns are at a disadvantage, (and the Swedes would be too if it weren’t for the heroics of the world’s greatest skater Jester Bratt) I get that excluding the Russians this year has some bad timing to it given the somewhat unexpected resurgence of Ovechkin. But in all it’s a clever way to inject new life into all star week.
Looking forward to Tkachuck mixing it up with the swedes while Bratter and Hughes stand off to the side chatting.
With the French Canadians booing our National Anthem I'm hoping Brady decides he wants out of Canada the way Matthew did, and ends up on his cousins team. After all his wife is a Jersey Girl and he lives in NJ in the off-season. I would give up alot to get him.
You have 9 teams listed. Assuming they go with 8, Slovakia or Germany would be the odd man out. Switzerland seems to have passed both of them by.
9 would be 3 groups of 3. Each team plays two round robins..top team in each plus one wild card make the knockout round.
Can’t leave out Germany with drausaitl. Can’t leave out Slovakia with recent top draft picks. So they go with 9..very doable within a 2 week period
Eh I guess that would work but I think only two round-robin games is too few, and I hate having wild card teams in tournaments. Combining wild card with only two round robin games would mean that the wild card team is definitely decided by standings tiebreakers. With 9 viable countries, I think it would be better to just bring in Latvia/Norway/Denmark and make it two groups of five.
Thats possible. I think that’s alot of games in a small window, though. Unless there’s no knockout round and top 2 in each group play for championship. I suppose that could work.
I think they have to have more than 8 teams if they truly want to showcase the worlds best.
If this is a total NHL production, do it like the Security Council at the UN…some permanent, some come and go.
Also like they do at EPCOT. 🙂
No. The murderous regime is rightly banned. Just like at the World Championships, Olympics, Soccer, etc.
I might have missed it somewhere, but I'm assuming the tournament will be in the offseason like previous World Cups, so I think squeezing the tournament into a short time frame isn't as necessary as this mid-season 4 Nations Faceoff. For whatever it's worth, the three prior iterations of the World Cup all had the same 8 teams--the ones you listed minus Switzerland.
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