TORONTO – In building an Olympic squad without NHL players for the first time since 1994, Tom Renney feels some lament that Hockey Canada no longer has the old men's national team program which centralized and groomed players for various Winter Games.
An assortment of aspiring professionals, minor-leaguers, European-based pros, guys seeking a last hurrah and the occasional star mired in a contract dispute, the squad would spend months together in preparation for international tournaments.
Renney, now president and CEO of Hockey Canada, was the head coach of the last Olympic team to have the guts of the squad made up on national team program players at the '94 Games in Lillehammer. Bolstered by the late additions of Paul Kariya, naturalized Canadian Petr Nedved and Brad Werenka, that group won a surprise silver, losing the final in a shootout to Sweden on Peter Forsberg's iconic goal.
"The national team program back in the day might have been our best development vehicle," Renney said Wednesday, after Nike unveiled the slick new jerseys Canada's hockey teams will wear for the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang. "We barnstormed Canada with other federations and played a series of games, we'd have a coaching clinic, we'd have kids out on the ice during the day with skills camps or whatever the case may be. We'd do all kinds of community events in order to help promote the game of hockey. So in lots of ways it was a great development tool.
"At the end of the day, it didn't procure for us the type of investment we needed financially to perpetuate the program. But it sure did a lot of great things for a lot of people and I do very much have a soft spot for that approach."
Such an approach would have come in handy for the upcoming Olympics in Pyeongchang, which the NHL declined to participate in against the wishes of its players. Willie Desjardins will coach the 2018 iteration of the national team expected to once again rely heavily on European-based professionals and eligible American Hockey League players.
Already Olympic hopefuls suited up for Canada at a pair of August tournaments, while a squad that includes former NHLers like Gilbert Brule, Mason Raymond, Rene Bourque, Wojtek Wolski and Ben Scrivens hits the ice next week for the Karjala Cup in Helsinki, Finland.
Hockey Canada has had discussions about a return to action with Jarome Iginla and Shane Doan, with the former a possibility if he decides to play in some warmup events beforehand and the latter settled into his new role in the NHL's hockey operations department.
Players in the NCAA and junior stars in the Canadian Hockey League will get looks, too, but candidates from the other talent pools are more the focal point right now.
"Our objective is to make sure we don't overlook anybody anywhere," said Renney.
Beyond the Karjala Cup, there's also the Channel One Cup in Moscow that runs Dec. 12-17 to help in team building, although the stop-and-start nature of the process is less than optimal.
Back in 1994, the men's program was a different beast, with players spending months together gearing up for the Games. It also made the final roster decisions that much more difficult and Todd Hlushko, one of Canada's bright lights in Lillehammer with five goals, remembers a "Black Sunday" in Waterloo, Ont., shortly before the Olympics during which a handful of players were cleared out to make room for a handful of late arrivals.
"It sucked. Everyone was in tears," recalled Hlushko. "We were on the ice like, 'What's going on, where is everybody?' Tom had to make some serious cuts to get these higher level guys to come in and play for Team Canada."
The moves worked, as Canada nearly ended its Olympic gold-medal drought in Lillehammer, and Renney eventually springboarded from the national team to the NHL, becoming head coach of the Vancouver Canucks in 1996-97. After his firing the next season, he rejoined Hockey Canada as vice-president, hockey operations and ended up overseeing the transition of the national men's team program into its current form, a process pushed in part by the NHL's Olympic participation.
"I was responsible for the national teams, coaching the men again and I remember a meeting we had in British Columbia where we went through all of our programs, 1-66," said Renney. "The men's national team didn't rank real high and we were ranking them for a reason. I think I had them ranked No. 12 overall in being important to us but the majority of the group suggested that its time had come. I couldn't argue that point.
"I looked at it still very much as a development opportunity, as a grassroots connection to continue to play that men's national team and participate in the world championships. But at the end of the day, the NHLers were dominant, even on our world championship teams and certainly to the point where they became that at the Olympic Games. You know what? The game's better for it."
Now, players outside the NHL get another chance to shine, and a new generation of unheralded Canadians gets the chance to capture the public's imagination the way the '94 team did.
For players like Hlushko, a 12th-round pick of the Washington Capitals in 1990 who spent two years in the minors before hooking up with the national team, the old program, "meant everything."
"It gave me a career," he said. "It was so funny because before the Olympics I had no teams calling me. I'm the exact same player two weeks after the tournament – I had a good tournament, I had five goals in the Olympics, it was great – and then I had eight teams calling me. I'm like, what just happened? I'm the same guy from two weeks ago. But it's that platform, right? It wasn't that I was any different, it's just that you had that platform and were able to excel at that level."
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