It has been some time because the NHL despatched its gamers to the Olympics or had any best-on-best match that includes the highest hockey nations on the earth. However, the subject of getting one other best-on-best hockey match is getting extra gas after Connor McDavid was requested about his thoughts on the World Baseball Classic.
“I thought it was really cool,” Connor McDavid informed reporters final Wednesday. “It’s what we’ve been asking for in hockey for a long time, right, best-on-best?”
The 2023 World Baseball Classic championship sport featured the perfect from Team USA and Japan. It got here right down to Los Angeles Angels teammates Shoehei Ohtani and Mike Trout. With Ohtani pitching and Trout on the plate, Ohtani was in a position to strike out Trout to win the World Baseball Classic for Japan.
It was not simply the baseball world speaking about what occurred at that second, the entire sports activities world was speaking about it. Including these within the NHL, who’ve wished to see their gamers compete on a world stage for fairly a while now.
“Look, everyone is talking about baseball, ‘Did you see Ohtani vs. Trout?’ and that’s what hockey’s been missing for almost a decade now,” McDavid continued. “That’s what we’ve been asking for.”
McDavid is completely proper about this. The final time NHLers went to the Olympics was in 2014 in Sochi. While the final World Cup of Hockey was in 2016 which noticed Team Europe and Team North America change two hockey nations.
McDavid was a part of that younger weapons Team North American workforce with Auston Matthews, Jack Eichel, and Nathan MacKinnon. But McDavid final represented Canada on a world stage on the 2015 World Junior Hockey Championships.
Players need to go play for his or her international locations and have a real best-on-best match. Now some NHLers when their season is over will go play within the IIHF World Championships, however it’s not the identical as having a real best-on-best match.
Fans need to see Connor McDavid play alongside the likes of MacKinnon and Sidney Crosby, carrying the Maple Leaf on the entrance of their sweater taking up a Team USA workforce with the likes of Matthews, Eichel, Jack Hughes, and Patrick Kane. But with every passing season, the possibilities have gotten slimmer as gamers are getting older.
The NHL-NHLPA wished to have a World Cup of Hockey in 2024, however with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia it received pushed again. They have but to announce the small print for the subsequent World Cup of Hockey. However, the tentative date is 2025.
Recently the IIHF prolonged Russia and Belarus’s ban to play in worldwide occasions just like the Men’s and Women’s World Championships, the World Juniors, and different occasions by means of the 2023/24 season.
This complicates issues as a result of a real best-on-best match must embrace Russia. We know the worldwide federations pool their gamers from others leagues in addition to the NHL. Now it has labored within the World Juniors, however it’s not the identical.
One factor is for certain, whereas the race for the ultimate spots within the Stanley Cup Playoffs is thrilling, nothing beats the thrills of enjoying to your nation. That is what will get the folks speaking.
Hopefully, one-day hockey can get again to having a best-on-best match so we will see the perfect gamers on the earth on a good grander stage. With the gamers talking out greater than ever, possibly they will make it right into a actuality.