Hockey: Interviewing Brent Seabrook, and why the Olympics top the NHL

Last week, I spoke with Chicago Blackhawks' defenceman Brent Seabrook for a South Delta Leader piece about what it was like for him to compete in the Olympics at home, so I figured I'd spotlight that here. Let's take a look at what he had to say, consider why Olympic hockey is special and think about if there's a way to use those lessons to make the NHL more exciting.

One of the most interesting comments I thought Seabrook made was about how Olympic competition is in some ways even more intense than the NHL playoffs, thanks to the single-elimination format and the national, not city-wide, focus on the games.

"There was so much at stake in such a short time after the round-robin," Seabrook said. "The qualification and the medal round, it's one game and you're out. Everybody was putting it on the line and making every shift count."

That single-elimination format also makes it tougher to recover from a bad shift or a bad game.

"It was unbelievable," Seabrook said. "It sort of felt like we were back in the playoffs playing like that but at the same time, there's almost more on the line during the Olympics. It's one game and you're out. In the playoffs, if you have a bad game, you still have at least three more to bounce back and be better. It's a little different format which makes it not as nerve-racking, not as crazy."

He said that additional pressure requires players to avoid getting too low after a loss or too high after a win.

"I think you're nervous and what not, but I think it puts you on more of an even keel," he said. "You're playing against arguably the best teams that are put together in the world. You've got your Russia, your Slovakia, your USA, your Canada—all of those teams have a lot of top players. To get up after a big win is tough because its such a short tournament. If you start doing that, you start losing focus and you can find yourself going over."

To me, that pressure and intensity is what makes the Olympic tournament so interesting. The NHL's playoffs are great, too, and they're probably a fairer way to determine a champion (sample size alone dictates that the top teams are more likely to prevail in a best-of-seven series than in a single-elimination tournament), but that fairness comes with a tradeoff; it means there's less on the line in each game (except a Game Seven), and it also means that underdogs are less likely to win.

There's a good reason that most of the memorable underdog runs in the playoffs (1982 Canucks, 1994 Canucks, 1996 Panthers, 2002 Hurricanes, 2003 Mighty Ducks, 2004 Flames, 2006 Oilers) ended with Stanley Cup Final losses; the best-of-seven format makes it awfully tough for underdogs to go all the way. I'm not advocating making the NHL playoffs a single-game knockout tournament; the current format is interesting, and it provides a couple months of good hockey. For sheer thrills, though, I'm not sure it can compare to the Olympics.

Moreover, the Olympics have another big advantage over the NHL; they show us a hockey game with less talent dilution. Sure, there are weak teams in the tournament, but the upper-echelon countries like Canada, the U.S., Russia and Sweden all have more talent than any NHL team (mostly because there are far less elite countries than NHL teams). The focus on offence instead of grinding and goonery also helps; teams tend to roll three or four lines of talented players instead of going with the typical NHL mix of two talented lines and two lines of muckers. Bruce Arthur wrote an interesting piece after the Olympics criticizing the NHL's brand of regular-season hockey, which is almost anathema for Canadian writers; many spend much of their time talking about how great the game is without looking at its flaws. I'd argue that many of those flaws carry over into the playoffs, too, particularly on the talent-dilution side. There are plenty of good reasons the Olympic hockey ratings were so massive and so far beyond what we usually see for hockey, and they go beyond pure nationalism; the Olympics offer a product the NHL can't match.

That doesn't mean there's nothing that can be done. I've gone to a lot of AHL games this year, and one thing I've noticed is that most AHL teams have plenty of players with a good bit of offensive talent. The problem is that, as I pointed out in a Canuck Puck piece before this season started, most NHL teams have very clearly defined forward line identities. The top two lines are expected to score, the bottom two are expected to check and fight. Thus, if an offensively-minded AHL forward isn't quite good enough to crack his NHL team's top-six forwards, he's probably going to remain an AHL forward.

Changing that mentality to one that emphasizes offence from all players might produce a more exciting game, and rule tweaks to reduce headshots and open up the game could also help. That's not a call for banning hitting or fighting; both have their place in the sport in my mind. What I'd like to see in the NHL is more of a focus on players who can both score and hit, like Alex Ovechkin, Brenden Morrow and David Backes. In the meantime, though, pencil me in amongst the crowd that wants to see NHL players in the 2014 Olympics in Russia; the tournament simply offers a fantastically thrilling brand of hockey we can't see anywhere else.

More than a game

Hockey. At times, it's just a game. Men's hockey is a somewhat odd inclusion in the Winter Olympics, given that its athletes are by and large (Tore Vikingstads excluded) internationally-renowned millionaires. That's in sharp contrast to the rest of the athletes, who generally aren't living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. At the same time, the sport is the marquee event of the Winter Olympics, and the most accessible event for many; most people have at least a passing familiarity with the game and the rules, unlike sports like curling or figure skating. It deserves to be here, and it deserves to be the final event.

The problem with that, though, is that the men's hockey final takes on so much significance that it can overshadow the rest of the Games. This is especially true in Canada, where our national identity is so bound up with hockey. As I wrote earlier, that's a somewhat superficial comparison, because we are much, much more than that. It still is an accurate one, though; despite our differences and our other interests, by and large, we still have such an incredible overriding concern for hockey.

That's why I was a bit concerned before this game about a potential excess of Canadian pride. Often, our passion for hockey enters unrealistic territory; we take a page from Don Cherry's playbook and start to think that Canadians are the only ones who can play and the natural superpower. That's not the case anymore. Before the tournament, I did predict that Canada would win, but I figured that any of four teams (Canada, Russia, the U.S. and Sweden) had a good shot at the top spot, and Slovakia and Finland provided surprisingly good as well.

Hockey may be a Canadian game in origin, but it's moved well beyond the bounds of Canada and there are great players from all over the world. Jingoistic types like Cherry still fail to realize that, and in doing so, they put such pressure on Canada to win every tournament that it becomes unrealistic. The Canadians may have the best and the deepest lineup, but there's a lot of parity out there, and upsets are to be expected (as happened against the U.S. in the round-robin).

Still, if Canada had come up short here, as they very nearly did, it would have spoiled the Olympics for many. All the success the country had acheived, even tying for the most golds ever won in a Winter Olympics, would have been overlooked because of a less-than-expected performance in men's hockey. The celebrations would have gone on, but they would have been muted rather than exuberant. There would have been a lengthy post-mortem, complete with endless dissections of the roster selection and the coaches' decisions. In short, it would have cast a pall [Barry Petchesky, Deadspin] over everything else that had been acheived. Instead, this victory just puts a cap on the celebration [Greg Wyshynski, Puck Daddy]. That it came in such dramatic fashion, in such an outstanding game [Andy Hutchins, The Sporting Blog], is just the icing on the cake, and made the hockey tournament the perfect conclusion to the games.

Are there still issues to be addressed with Olympic hockey? Of course there are. For one thing, I've argued all tournament that the smaller NHL-size ice gave physical teams like Canada, the U.S. and Finland (who earned the bronze last night) a big advantage as opposed to the more wide-open style of play on the Olympic-size ice used in Turin in 2006. Timo Seppa, a Finnish-born hockey writer at Puck Prospectus who also runs Ice Hockey Metrics, made the same point in a preview of the Olympic tournament over at the SportsJudge Blog. That doesn't mean these teams would necessarily have failed on bigger ice, but it does raise an intriguing question as to how they'll perform in Russia in 2014. After all, Canadians may have some scoring talent these days, but we all know that a farmboy from Canada has to hit somebody.



First off, though, the NHL has to let their players go to those Olympics. As Phil Catelinet wrote, the Olympics are a tremendous promotional venue for the NHL. It's basically like two weeks of all-star games where the players actually care, and throwing nationalism into the equation gets many non-hockey fans and casual fans into the sport. The Olympics are like a gateway drug in that respect; some will get excited about them and then return to ignoring hockey, but others will become hooked. Unlike drug addiction itself, getting sports fans hooked on hockey is a good thing, particularly for the growth of the game in the U.S. That's why Gary Bettman has to realize how important the Olympics are to his league before 2014. Sure, it's a two-week break and it comes with injury issues and the like, but in the end, those are minor concerns compared to the promotion the NHL receives in return.

Still, in the end, the future can be worried about at a later date. This was the perfect conclusion to an imperfect, but highly exciting Games. In the grand scheme of things, it may be just one little victory in a simple game, but right now, it feels like so much more.