World's best ice hockey players: generation of spectators

Leon Draisaitl has already achieved quite a lot at the age of just 26.

Top scorer and most valuable player in the North American NHL, Sportsman of the Year at home, German record scorer in the strongest ice hockey league in the world.

And also in the current season he leads the scorer list again, after 29 games he has an outstanding 23 goals and 26 assists.

It's going on for the native of Cologne, who still had a special goal for this season: his first Olympic Games.

However, nothing will come of that, the NHL has been hit hard by Corona, around 150 players and coaches are currently on the so-called Covid list, almost 50 games have already been canceled, this week the league suspended all operations. And she canceled her participation in the Olympic Games in order to make up for the canceled games during the break provided. “It's a shame,” says Draisaitl, “he would have loved to be on the ice for Germany in Beijing. An Olympic tournament with the best players in the world would have been something special. "

But again there is nothing to see. Like in 2018, when the NHL did not approve its players because they found South Korea too unattractive as a market. The ice hockey world has been waiting for a tournament of the best against the best since 2014. There is an annual world championship, but it always takes place parallel to the play-offs of the NHL, so many stars have no time or simply don't feel like it. The next destination is now Milan 2026.

Then it will be twelve years since all nations competed against each other with their best possible cadres. Meanwhile, a whole generation of players full of super talents is watching. Which is a pretty one-off process in team sport. Imagine that Lionel Messi had never been to a World Cup with Argentina, LeBron James had never been able to win Olympic gold in basketball with the United States, or that the best German handball players would not have been able to prove themselves against other top nations for twelve years.

That's how it is in ice hockey. Which is all the more bitter because the sport has developed enormously. He has become faster, more elegant, more tricky. Day after day, the social media are full of highlight videos by gifted people like the Canadian Connor McDavid, the American Auston Matthews, the Russian Nikita Kutscherow, the Swede Victor Hedman, the Swiss Roman Josi or the German Leon Draisaitl. But none of them ever belonged to a national team that played with the best cast.

To just attach that to Corona would be too easy. The NHL, which is independent of all associations, is to blame in particular, which always emphasizes how important the global growth of the sport is to it, but which is only interested in the bank accounts of its powerful team owners. If they had their way, the NHL would not have even considered participating in the Olympics for 2022. The commitment was only given at the insistence of the players' union - with an exit clause for the league if the corona situation does not allow it. So it happened now.

The team owners have basically nothing left for national teams and tournaments where they don't earn anything. It has always been like that, generations of NHL players never made a single international match. Wayne Gretzky, the best player in history, didn't play at the Olympics until he was 37, and that was in 1998 when the NHL first released its stars. Before that, the Canadian Association had to send amateurs and juniors for decades, and in the 1970s it even boycotted the World Cup for years. To date, Canada and the United States have no permanent national coaches, and new ones will be appointed for each tournament at short notice.

It was always different in Europe. But because more and more Europeans came to the NHL after the end of the Cold War, Russians, Swedes and Czechs also had to do without their best. Until 1998, and again since 2014. To the chagrin of the players who would like to play. That is why there is now loud calls for a new World Cup - a kind of separate World Cup for the NHL, which was last held in 2016. However, only with six nations, a North American U-23 and a "Team Europe", in which Germans played together with Swiss and Slovaks. It could be different next time. More participants, more “real” national teams. That would still not be an Olympic tournament, but better than nothing. So that the current generation of players can argue at least once about which ice hockey nation is the best in the world.