Canada, hockey and heritage

Exhibit A: The Ottawa Senators and their Stanley Cup banners

This is what's been hung from the rafters at Scotiabank Place:

And they're all lies. The teams that won those cups were never called the Ottawa Senators; that was just their nickname. The name of the team was the Ottawa Hockey Club, or Ottawa HC for short. And anyway, whatever they're called, the franchise that plays in that arena hasn't won a single Stanley Cup. They have no connection whatsoever to the team that did, except that they've taken the earlier team's nickname and made it their name. They have as much right to those Cup banners as I do.

Exhibit B: The Winnipeg Jets [sic] and their logo

The Winnipeg Jets [sic], of course, aren't the Winnipeg Jets; the Phoenix Coyotes are. The "Winnipeg Jets" of today are the Atlanta Thrashers. It's incredibly disrespectful to the original Jets for the Thrashers' new Canadian owners to simply steal the name of the old team, especially since the Coyotes are the only ex-WHA team that actually commemorates their WHA heritage.

And the logo? What's that even supposed to be? I'm told by the Jets' Wikipedia page that it's an F/A-18 Hornet, as used by the Canadian air force. Except it isn't. Here's the Jets logo:

And here's a Hornet:

What's going on at the back of the Jets' jet, where the Hornet's exhausts are supposed to be? There's, like, a spike? So in addition to stealing the old Jets' name, they play with a logo that defaces the equipment of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The old Jets had a portrait of her Majesty the Queen in their arena; the new Jets mock her military.

And anyway, if the new Jets were any kind of patriots, they wouldn't have a US jet on their logo, but the Avro Arrow, as far as I'm concerned.

It's often said that hockey is a very conservative sport. In the day-to-day political sense of the word, i.e. hating people who are different than you and being angry a lot, I suppose that's true. But as for respecting your past and your heritage and everything like that? In Ottawa and Winnipeg at least, not so much.

Kony, Jenna Talackova and Trayvon Martin

What does an Internet campaign to stop an African warlord have in common with a trans woman barred from a beauty contest and a black teenager murdered in cold blood by a vigilante? Simple: they're all symptoms of what may be our biggest problem as a society and a culture.

In each case, we react when presented with an individual example of injustice, but ignore the wider context. We enthusiastically share the Kony video, but does anyone care why people like him can run riot in Africa? Probably the single biggest reason is the poverty of most of the continent, which leaves governments powerless. One of the chief causes of that poverty is the agricultural policy of us, the world's developed nations. The majority of Africans are farmers, but we won't let them export their surplus to us. Instead, we subsidize farmers in the West to over-produce food, which we then dump on the world market, driving African subsistence farmers deeper into poverty. Is this even mentioned in, say, discussions on agricultural policy in the West? Nope. Indeed, most of the people I saw going on about Kony think that buying domestically grown produce and "supporting our farmers" is virtuous.

It's heartening that the Trayvon case has stirred up such an outcry. But most of the questions being asked are secondary or irrelevant. The real question isn't stand your ground laws or whether the shooter should have been arrested. The question is: how have you managed to create an environment where a suburban vigilante makes thousands of 911 calls solely to report black men in his neighborhood, shoots one of them for no reason, and not only avoids arrest but has his story unquestioningly believed by the police, who publicly defend him? The question isn't if a particular law or an individual police officer of department is at fault, or even the moronic question of whether the vigilante in question was a racist. It's how incredibly racist your society has to be for this whole sequence of events to unfold at all.

How does Jenna Talackova tie into this? As empirical proof. I offer you this tweet from the formidable Natalie Reed: "Miss Universe Canada petition got 20,000 signatures, Bill C-279 petition only 280. I really, really, really, REALLY hate humanity right now." Bill C-279 is a trans rights bill that you can read about here. So about a hundred times more people support trans rights than... support trans rights. Again, people think that a given individual shouldn't be mistreated because she's a trans woman, but they won't support a bill to end that mistreatment.

Part of the problem is psychological. As my co-blogger put it: "our brains can't multiply". We can, if we choose,empathize with a single individual, but we're really bad at empathy with a group. But it's more than that. The same reaction comes up all the time, in just about every political discussion; the copyright system, police brutality (especially the American practice of senseless SWAT raids and wholesale murdering of dogs), racism, corruption. Confronted with an individual example, people will decry and condemn it, but balk at any suggestion that there could possibly be a wider, even structural, problem. It goes far beyond sensible caution of sweeping political reforms; it's a wholesale denial of the very possibility that we might live in a society where systemic injustice happens.

In my opinion, it's simply a psychological defense mechanism that protects people from having to ask themselves difficult questions about the world they live in. It's hard to think about big political questions. Much easier to live in a fairy-tale world where society is fundamentally good and sound, and all problems are caused by evil individuals. Makes for better Hollywood movies, too. The problem is that it also leads people to passively condone, or even actively support, policies and structures that directly harm the people that they claim to sympathize with.

Banning fictional child pornography is wrong

I'll let the Ottawa Citizen introduce the subject:

Ottawa Citizen: Crimes of imagination

Canada has charged an American and is threatening him with at least a year in jail because he came over the border in 2010 with comics on his laptop, comics the customs officer decided were child pornography. If he's convicted, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of a year for importing the material. This case and others like it demonstrate the flaws in Canada's law.

According to the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, the comics were in the "manga" style that originated in Japan (Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are examples of manga comics. Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF says he believes the comics in this case include images of stick figures in sexual positions).

The Canadian law criminalizes fictional child pornography, by which I mean pornographic material like drawings or text that features children, but that no real children were abused in the making of. I'll let the Citizen finish:

But Canada's current law goes beyond pornography that causes harm to children. It also makes some works of the imagination - stories and drawings - illegal if they depict people under the age of 18 in sexual situations. Many classic works of art might meet that definition, and the law does allow for a defence on the grounds of artistic merit. This puts the courts in the bizarre position of determining what is a work of art. Citizens cannot hope to know in advance what the law really forbids, and whether the judge will share their opinion of what is art. Policing the way you express yourself on a piece of paper or on your laptop comes awfully close to policing your thoughts.

Judges are not meant to be arbiters of taste; they are meant to balance rights in a free society. Imaginary people do not have rights.

Similar laws are in the works in Finland as well, where it will join other highly questionable laws that already make even the definition of child pornography arbitrary. In fact, Finnish courts are already not only determining what constitutes art, but also whether parody is succesful, because that is the determining criterion to whether a parody constitutes an IP violation. So in Finland, courts determining what is art won't be anything new.

If you think they're exaggerating about policing thoughts, by the way, Finland's state police have already applied for a law criminalizing talking about having sex with children in an approving manner. I so wish I was making that up.

**

There are those who say that protecting children from sexual abuse is so important that we must do anything to stop it. Whatever one may think of this, laws against fictional child pornography fail on that count.

Daily Mail: Charity's anger at proposal to make child porn legal 'to protect children from abusers'

The research found that child sex crimes fell when child pornography was more easily accessible.

The discovery tallies with similar studies in Denmark and Japan, where child pornography is not illegal, that found incidences of child sex abuse were lower in those countries.

The conclusion of the new study is that ‘artificially-produced’ child pornography should be made available to prevent real children being abused.

Pornography was strictly prohibited in the Czech Republic between 1948 and 1989.

The ban was lifted with the country's transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offence.

Diamond and his team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes as it moved from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to the material being decriminalised.

Results from the Czech Republic showed that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalisation and wide availability of pornography.

Most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan.

They also found that the number of cases of indecent exposure and other, less serious, sex crimes fell dramatically in the wake of pornography becoming more readily available.

The researchers say: ‘As with adult pornography appearing to substitute for sexual aggression everywhere it has been investigated, we believe the availability of child porn does similarly.’

So not only are no children harmed in the making of fictional child pornography, its availability seems to decrease sex crimes against children. In general, pornography decreases sex crime, so this finding makes sense. I know that this cuts no ice with determined anti-pornography crusaders, who replace scientific data with claims that porn makes you gay, but the reality is that fictional child pornography, if anything, seems to make children more safe.

However, that's a terrible argument for not banning it. The Ottawa Citizen put it quite nicely when they said:

There's no point in having a right to free speech if we make exceptions for everything that people find distasteful or offensive.

In fact, that's the kind of free speech we have in Finland; our constitution guarantees Finnish citizens freedom of expression, except when constrained by law. In other words, our constitution gives us a right to say things that we're not banned from saying. Some right! The only place I can think of that doesn't allow its citizens to do things that aren't specifically forbidden is the fictional city of Raseir in the classic CRPG Quest for Glory 2, which boasted a street named "Everything Not Mandatory is Forbidden". So we, as Finnish citizens, have more rights than the inhabitants of a fictional computer game dictatorship.

Hooray!

But I digress. As a criterion for banning expression, the harm it causes is a dangerous guideline. In nearly every debate on free speech, someone quotes the example of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. It might be salutary to remember where the expression comes from: it was used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to justify sentencing a man to six months in prison for distributnig anti-draft leaflets. It was the judge's opinion that inciting people against the draft posed a "clear and present danger" to the United States, and was therefore illegal.

This tug-of-war between the desire to criminalize dissent and uphold freedom of expression should serve to point out that the harmfulness or harmlessness of speech is insufficient in itself as a criterion. Harm is a flexible concept that can be stretched a long way, and if we subordinate free expression to a critetion of harm, are we really willing to ban anything that can be considered, or even proven, to have harmful effects?

Suppose that someone demonstrated that people who read detective novels are more likely to commit violent crime than people who don't? Or, to take a real-life example, someone came up with data to support the decades-old idea that comic books predispose childrne to crime? Would you then be willing to ban detective novels and comic books under the same criteria as fictional child pornography? After all, they'd be harmful. Remember that as far as we know, no form of expression can directly cause a person to commit a crime; all they can do is predispose. That's a matter of much correlation and very little causation.

This is why it's dangerous, and I believe in many cases morally dishonest to argue against banning fictional child pornography just by quoting its beneficial effect on sex crime rates. That isn't actually an argument in favor of freedom of expression; it's an argument that this particular kind of expression is beneficial and should therefore be allowed. It's a whole different story, and begs the question: if the data should be refuted by a better study, would you change your mind? And would you support the hypothetical comic-book ban if data in its favor were produced? If not, you're making a morally dishonest argument.

**

In other words, this isn't a question of whether fictional child pornography is beneficial or harmful, but of what the limits of free expression are. It's been shown time and again that juging expression by the harm it supposedly causes is a primrose path to censorship. I can't believe that even the most ardent anti-child pornography crusaders would want to live in a country where all expresion is regulated based on whether it's deemed harmful to society or not. There's practically no limit to what such a dystopia might end up banning. After all, people are healthier if they're happy; therefore things that make them unhappy make them less healthy, and are therefore harmful. Under this rationale anything could be banned.

The only rationale for the outright ban on child pornography is that a child was necessarily abused to create the image. It should be recognized that this is also a problematic piece of reasoning; technically, it could equally well be used to ban pictures of terrorist attacks. Even if we accept the ban on child pornography, we can't extend it to fictional child pornography using the same rationale, because no children were necessarily abused for its creation. We don't ban other fictional depictions of crime, even other fictional depictions of sex crime, so why should the sexual abuse of children be treated differently?

Any ban of fictional child pornography necessarily creates one of two disturbing precedents: either that expression can be regulated according to its harmfulness, or that when it comes to child pornography, a different standard of civil rights prevails. Finland is currently pursuing the latter policy. Neither should be chosen by a free country.

The NHL is back in Winnipeg

TSN: TRUE NORTH BUYS THRASHERS, SET TO MOVE TEAM TO WINNIPEG

Fifteen years after the departure of the Jets, the city of Winnipeg has arrived at a triumphant moment that many thought would never come.

NHL hockey is returning to the Manitoba capital.

The True North Sports and Entertainment group announced on Tuesday that they have completed a deal to purchase the Atlanta Thrashers and move them to Winnipeg in time for the 2011-12 season.

The whole mythology that's grown up in Canada about NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is laughable, and it should really be properly documented for posterity. There seems to be a huge bunch of people who genuinely believe that he's evil, and that he hates Canada and hockey. In this lunatic view, the reason that, say, the Jets moved to Phoenix is because Bettman hates Canada. In their view, this relocation is a victory for Canada, because Bettman's evil plans have been foiled and another franchise is moving to Canada, where hockey "belongs".

What few people seem to want to remember is that the Winnipeg Jets became the Phoenix Coyotes because they couldn't make the franchise work in Winnipeg. Here's a snippet from the TSN article:

The team will play out of the MTS Centre, which opened in 2004 and has a capacity of just over 15,000 seats.

With a population of 762,600, Winnipeg will be the smallest market among the 30 NHL cities.

It's also the smallest arena. It remains to be seen if the new Winnipeg franchise is going to be any more successful than the previous one. There doesn't really seem to be any reason why it would be.

**

Another thing that gets lost in the conversation is the overall reason why hockey franchises have been established in the southern parts of the US in the first place: only by bringing hockey to new markets will the sport expand. Hockey in California has been a success, with Anaheim bringing the Cup home and the Sharks strong contenders. On the other seaboard, Tampa made a great run for the Cup this year and already have one under their belt. Dallas's ownership situation is currently in flux, but when it's all worked out, there's another strong "southern" team with a Cup win.

By being in new markets and succeeding there, these teams are doing what no franchise in Canada ever can: bringing hockey to a whole new audience and broadening the game's markets. There's value in that for the whole hockey community, which the league recognizes in its franchise location policy that Bettman implements. That Canadian fans won't recognize this just speaks to the ridiculous parochialism that is Canadian hockey culture. The whole notion that hockey "belongs" somewhere is moronic in itself, but placing this kind of jingoism over a sensible market strategy is just madness.

Let me make clear that I'm not against relocating teams to Canada. However, I'm also not against relocating teams to the US either, or even Mexico if someone wants to give it a shot. It's a free market, so anyone who wants to put their money on the line, goes through the proper motions and has some kind of sensible plan is, in my opinion, more than welcome to buy an existing franchise and move it somewhere else.

A few years back the Islanders' owner was teasing the idea that the Isles would move to Kansas City, which has long been in contention for a new franchise. As it was, the move was likely just a PR strategy designed to get the city of Long Island to invest in a new arena. Given the Isles' abysmally low attendance record, though, I'm not sure it wouldn't actually be a really good idea to move. If I'm not wrong, that would be the first time a Cup-winning team in the modern era relocated after the win; the Montréal Maroons tried to relocate after their win but it didn't work out. The Maroons, by the way, are also the only Cup-winning modern team to become defunct.

**

As a final point, there's a push to have the Thrashers renamed the Jets when they land in Winnipeg. I have to say that I strongly dislike the idea, because the Jets franchise is still around; it's just called the Coyotes now. Sure, we've had two separate franchises both called the Ottawa Senators, but they were separated by over half a century. As the Thrashers were named after the state bird of Georgia, a name change seems reasonable enough, but really, in my opinion they should come up with their own name.

At the very least, it's going to be weird if there's a Winnipeg Jets franchise in Winnipeg, but the old Winnipeg Jets' retired numbers are in Phoenix. It's not the same franchise, so it shouldn't have the same name. It's that simple!

This isn't the first time Atlanta has lost an NHL team; in 1980, the Atlanta Flames relocated to Calgary, where they remain today. Incidentally, that team apparently took its name from when Sherman burned Atlanta; I'm not sure what was burned in Calgary. Calgary was a much smaller market than Atlanta, but the Flames' financial situation in Atlanta had been very poor and their lack of a TV contract had made it very hard for them to compete with the other teams in town.

Relocation isn't always a great success, though, even when it's a move north: the Kansas City Scouts only spent six seasons as the Colorado Rockies until relocating a second time to New Jersey. As I said, I don't see any compelling reasons why the new Winnipeg franchise would be any more successful than the old one, so even though the deal is for 15 years, we'll wait and see.

One of a kind

Last friday 2011-05-13 Finland's Mikael Granlund scored a nifty goal against Team Russia at the Ice Hockey World Championship:



The goal has caught the attention of hockey fans around the world. TSN, Canada's sports leader, has an article on the goal.

TSN: FINLAND'S GRANLUND SCORES POSSIBLE GOAL OF THE YEAR

Early in the second period of Finland's semifinal win against Russia, Granland gathered the puck deep along the end boards in the Russian zone, stick-handled past a defender and behind the net, flipped the puck onto the blade of his stick, and flung it into the Russian's net, lacrosse style, to give the Fins a 1-0 lead.

TSN then goes on to make a strange claim:

Twice before has a goal like Granlund's been scored. In 1996, the University of Michigan's Mike Legg defeated the University of Minnesota in the NCAA Tournament with a similar goal, and in 2006 Sidney Crosby scored one just like it while with the Rimouski Oceanic in the QMJHL.

Twice before? That stretches credibility, as this move is quite popular in junior leagues around the world. And indeed, a quick look on the Web yielded several more instances.

Bill Armstrong has apparently scored a goal like that several times (two examples at 1:28), and claims to have pioneered the move.



As you may have gathered, those two goals came in the same week, so for him it wasn't a one time novelty move.

Mikael Granlund himself has scored a similar goal before in Finland's junior league.



And in 2008 U18 contest, though for a reason unclear to me that one was disallowed.



His brother Markus also scored a "lacrosse-style" goal in Finnish junior league.



And it's not just junior league stuff; "Zorro" goals have been seen in professional leagues as well. Here's Jani Lajunen, also a member of 2011 Team Finland, deciding an SM-liiga game on OT.



That was in 2010. If Granlund's goal is the goal of the year in 2011, that just means 2011 was slow. There was another high-profile lacrosse goal in 2010, in the playoff finals of Swiss league by Thomas Déruns.



So, yeah, twice before. TSN didn't even qualify that number in any way. I'm afraid the claim doesn't reflect well on TSN's hockey knowledge, or counting skills.

They do give Granlund's goal one distinction over Crosby's and Legg's.

But what made Granlund's goal extra special was that while both Legg and Crosby scored their goals standing still behind the net, Granlund pulled it off at full speed.

Much like Rob Hisey in SM-liiga. That's the reason Finnish play-by-play for Lajunen's goal called it a "Rob Hisey".



It's very unfortunate that Canada's series don't boast soft hands like that. Oh, Rob Hisey did it in another professional league as well, this time in Austria.



Of course, cool lacrosse goals seem to be his thing.



You'll note the clip is from TSN, so they can't really claim to be unaware of the guy.

Frankly, I expected better from TSN. The Finnish media is, predictably, going banana over Granlund's goal, which seems a little unwarranted as it's not all that unique, but I would have thought Canada's sports leader would have a little better sense of hockey history.

World Juniors preview

The hockey world junior championships start today. Funnily enough, Finland has managed to win once, in 1998. Mika Noronen stopped the Russians in the gold medal game, and Niklas Hagman's overtime goal gave Finland their only gold medal to date. The tournament all-star team included goaltender David Aebischer, defenseman Andrei Markov and Finnish forwards Eero Somervuori and Olli Jokinen.

The tournament, which is watched only in Canada, has been won by Canada 15 out of 37 times it has been held, including five years in a row from 2005 to 2009. Over the last eighteen years, they've finished without a medal only once. Every year, including this one, the Canadian hockey media makes a big deal about how Canada are going into the tournament as "underdogs", and nobody ever expects them to win. I mean, it would be ridiculous if one of the two countries that has totally dominated the tournament every time it has been held would be a favorite going in, wouldn't it?

Indeed, this year Canada are expected to finish a shocking 297th out of ten participating countries. Even though there are only 193 sovereign states in the world, it is widely thought that Canada's performance will be so poor that a hundred notional states will be invented and inserted into the hockey world ranking to fully express how badly Canada will do. Reports from Hockey Canada indicate that they don't expect any of the selected players to turn up, as the team was selected by randomly picking names from the Toronto area phonebook. The players thus selected were not informed.

Despite having more hockey players, both per capita and absolutely, than any other nation in the world, and being the only country that even notices the world junior tournament is on, the Canadian media are confident that this year will turn into another unmitigated debacle for the Canadian junior team. Prospects are so bleak that it will be an incredible upset if the team doesn't play so badly that every Canadian commits suicide out of shame at the end of the first period of play.

This year, like every year, Team Canada is expected to totally disgrace the nation at a tournament which they have so far dominated every past year. Despite having finished with a medal in seventeen out of the last eighteen tournaments, an eighteenth medal is considered highly unlikely and would be incredible, astounding proof of the ability of good Canadian boys to triumph against the terrible evil of foreigners, because they're underdogs. This seeming discrepancy is not one, because we don't say it is. When asked for comment, a Canadian hockey expert screamed about Lord Jesus Baby and talked about the troops.

Those wacky Canadians

(via, surprisingly, Dinosaur Comics)

Now here's something you don't see every day, at least in the supposedly civilized West. The Ontario cabinet secretly changed the law just before the G20 summit, to give the police wider powers to arrest people. There's a story here.

At Queen’s Park, NDP justice critic and lawyer Peter Kormos said: “This law was not only passed in secret, it was kept secret.

“This is the stuff Kafka wrote novels about. Secret laws that the citizenry is not aware of are the hallmarks of tin pot dictatorships.”

The measure, carrying a penalty of up to two months in jail or a $500 fine upon conviction, was revealed after a 31-year-old York University master’s student refused to show identification near the fence and was arrested based on a regulation few knew existed. He was held for five hours in a pen at a temporary holding centre on Eastern Ave.

Later, the CBC reported that there actually wasn't a secret law requiring people to show ID near a police fence, but there was a secret law nonetheless:

Premier Dalton McGuinty still hasn't explained why cabinet passed the regulation change in secret, and then kept it secret.

Even though it wasn't accurate, the public was left to believe the province had given officers the power to demand identification and detain anyone within five metres of the G20 site.

All weekend there were reports of police stopping people throughout downtown Toronto — often in areas nowhere near the G20 zone — demanding identification and to search bags and backpacks.

Seriously. A country that calls itself a democracy passes laws in secret to give the police additional powers. I rather liked what councillor Howard Moscoe said:

“These are police state regulations — we fought wars to protect freedoms like these,” thundered Councillor Howard Moscoe.

Amusingly, we've done similar things in Finland, only more like a police state. Before the infamous Smash ASEM protests in Helsinki in 2006, police participating in suppressing the protests had been explicitly told by their superiors that normal laws on detaining people would not apply today, and they should detain anyone they think is suspicious and hold them overnight.

Let me repeat myself: they had been told that the law doesn't apply. And they went with that.

Of course, when things were sussed out later their superiors obviously denied having ever said that. Nonetheless, the Finnish parliament's ombudsman, who's in charge of investigating these things, found the police had acted directly against the law several times in suppressing the protests. Of course, because this is Finland, none of that matters: a couple of officers were given a meaningless reprimand for directly violating the laws they're supposed to be upholding, and policemen who ordered others to break the law got nothing at all.

So really, while Canada passes secret laws and doesn't tell people about it, Finland doesn't even bother. For another proud example of the Finnish police and the rule of law, see here.

Civil liberties, eh?

IHWC: Last thoughts

So, the world champs are over and we've had a week to take a breather. Here's some concluding thoughts on the tournament.

We picked Canada to win, and they finished in seventh place. So that didn't go so well. However, I'm claiming credit on one point: unlike just about everyone else, we didn't pick Russia to win. I say this because there was a reason. I didn't think the Russians wanted their third medal in a row badly enough, and the way they played the tournament bore it out. They got to the final by playing consistently: in every game, they made the minimum effort required to win. In the final, they ran into a country prepared to do way more than the minimum, and lost. The same thing happened at Vancouver.

Head coach Bykov is leaving Team Russia, and it may be for the best. There's no denyning that he's changed Russia from a lackadaisical collection of skilled players to an international juggernaut, but it hasn't quite clicked yet. They're still a long way from the big red machine of a few decades ago, and in my opinion, one of the crucial differences is in the mentality. Bykov's squad has had real trouble showing up for big games. The ultimate humiliation was their awful start against Canada at Vancouver, but the same thing happened in Germany against the Czechs. In fact, despite the lopsided eventual numbers, it nearly happened against Finland; if the Finnish power play wasn't so amazingly rubbish, made even worse by coach Jalonen's inexplicable decision to insert a new player into the number one power play, Finland might have beaten the Russians the same way the Czechs did. As it is, though, Finland finished the tournament with the second-worst offensive. Only Kazakhstan scored less goals, and they were relegated. So that, as they say, is that. Recall, also, the world champs final in Canada against the home team, where the Russians almost gave the game away in the first two periods and had to mount an almost unimaginable comeback to win the game.

The reason I picked Canada to win was precisely this difference in mentality. While the Russians seem to stumble out of the gate in all their big games, the Canadians rarely suffer from this. What I didn't reckon with was that Mark Messier's first foray into general managering would be such an unmitigated disaster. As I said, the excuses are ready: Canada had only one olympic player and so on. They can hide behind that if they want, but really, their lack of Olympians should be a strength, not a weakness. Instead of sending guys jaded from Olympic success, they picked a young, hungry team that should have done much better. In my opinion, the fact that Corey Perry was their only Olympian makes the quarterfinal elimination all the stranger. And besides, looking at how Perry played, more players like him wouldn't have helped at all.

Speaking of Canada and the Olympics, this gives me an opportunity to poke fun at Canadian hockey again. One of the fundamental myths of Canadian hockey superiority is that while the "Euros" are in it for the money, Canadians play for the glory of Canada, hockey and the Stanley Cup. Remember how a few years back you couldn't read a story about NHL captains without someone brandishing the old adage about European captains? The claim was that no European captain had ever won the Stanley Cup, or would ever win the Stanley Cup, because Europeans just play for the paycheck and don't really care about hockey. Niclas Lidström put that one away, but the fundamental prejudice behind it remains.

That's why it was so funny to see the silly little storm-in-a-teacup over Crosby's refusal to play at the world champs. Apparently the kid didn't want to, saying via his agent that it was "more appropriate" for him to relax and prepare for the next season. Funnily, teammates Malkin & Gonchar didn't seem to think so, and turned up to represent Russia. Some people had the nerve to say that Crosby's refusal was disrespectful toward Hockey Canada, which sent everyone scrambling to the wünderkind's defense. Of course he doesn't have to play some stupid Mickey Mouse tournament! He has his day job to think about! It's fine by me; it's just somewhat amusing that Russian players put their national team before their summer vacation, the anointed messiah of Canadian hockey doesn't, and still Europeans are somehow less "principled" than Canadians. The doublethink required to be a Canadian hockey bigot is remarkable. Ceterum censeo, next time someone mentions running up the score, ask them why it doesn't apply to Team Canada. They beat Norway 12-1 this year.

Anyway, for me, the biggest disappointment of the whole tournament was Team USA. They, too, had a young team, fresh off the motivating mix of success and disappointment that is an Olympic silver medal (we know). Finland was in the same opening round group, and given how puny Finland's defense corps was, I fully expected the Americans to beat the snot out of Finland. They didn't, because incredibly enough, their offense was even worse than Finland's defense. The only thing I can say about the Americans' tournament is EPIC FAIL.

I expected the Americans and Finns to be in the medal games, and neither made it. Jukka Jalonen's Team Finland continues to fall short of even my pessimistic expectations. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons they lost to the Czechs was that like me, they too expected that Finland would win. The numbers would have been much uglier had the Czech offense not consisted almost entirely of unscreened wristshots. I find Jalonen's team to be a little confusing. On the one hand, there's a real attempt to play offensive hockey, even a puck possession game at times, which is a great change from the mind-numbing neutral zone trap we all got used to in the last ten years. It was long a mantra of Finnish hockey that Finland can only win through great defense and spectacular goaltending, and when every head coach fielded the same old 1-2-2, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. So in this sense, Jalonen is great for Finnish hockey.

What I have trouble with is two things. First, and least, the motivational aspect, which was highlighted by several commentators on Finnish state television. Jalonen's team also suffers from spectacularly bad play in big games, even compared to their usual level. The question has been raised whether Jalonen has the leadership to really get the team to give its all when it counts the most. More importantly, I can't wrap my head around the way he picks a team. As near as I can tell, he's totally dedicated to fielding the worst defense ever on a Finnish national team, and suceeded in doing so again this year. Granted, this is better than Erkka Westerlund's system of picking 20 wingers, three centermen and five D and rolling up lines with a pair of dice, but still, I don't understand what he's doing. Then again, I don't even know who actually picks the Finnish national team. Is it Jalonen? Or does our "GM" actually do something? I have to admit I don't even know, so I'm not sure whose fault this all is. Several signs point at Jalonen, though, including the strange inclusion of Antti Miettinen on all of his teams, despite his notorious uselessness on the national team, and an odd penchant for seemingly random players from the Finnish league.

On that note, I do have to gloat on two points about the Finnish team. Juhamatti Aaltonen, this year's European league wildcard, was just as useless as I said he would be in my Finnish-language preview. Aaltonen, touted as a "sniper", managed one (1) goal in the entire tournament, and that was a superfluous empty-netter against Slovakia. A second point is Miettinen's linemate. As I've said, before the tournament, Veikkaaja, the sports supplement (sort of) of one of Finland's biggest daily newspapers, was headlined "Savior". On the cover was Jussi Jokinen. Left off the Olympic team for dastardly and underhanded reasons, Jokinen was now going to save Team Finland at the world champs.

Yeah, right. When Jokinen was left off the Vancouver roster, I argued that this was for two reasons: Jalonen was going to play Mikko Koivu with his Minnesota linemate Miettinen, and Jokinen was always rubbish in international play. The first wasn't the case, perplexingly, but this spring Jokinen quite decisively proved the second. The "savior" of Team Finland was, again, useless. He scored two goals against Slovakia, but in the big games, what did he manage? He took an idiotic 2+10 against Russia for a flying elbow to Sergei Gonchar's head, and three minor penalties in the decisive game against the Czechs. To top it all off, the former shootout specialist missed the net on his game-deciding penalty shot. Some savior he.

That shootout was embarassing, by the way. The Czech forwards were great, but really, as he's freely admitted himself, Vokoun is rubbish at shootouts. He stays up for way too long. All three of Finland's shooters could easily have scored. As it was, only the first guy did; the next two had wide-open nets in front of them and missed. In a way, that does sum up Finland's whole tournament.

It also brings me neatly to the most important point I have. The great thing about the tournament as a whole was the importance of the offense. This year, teams that were good on the offense won, and teams that couldn't score didn't. The low-scoring Czechs were the exception that confirms the rule, while Denmark are pretty much the posterboys. Of the big countries, Finland, Sweden, Canada and the US suffered heavily from an inability to put the puck in the net, while a fearless offense landed Denmark a historical place in the quarterfinals. Switzerland also showed up with a much better offensive game than they ever had under Ralph Krüger, and they would have been in the semifinals if they'd only concentrated on the game, as opposed to spearing and fighting.

I fully expect the Swiss and Danes to do well next year too, while Finland may start paying a heavy price for its systemic neglect of goal-scorers in junior hockey. They may have won the world title, but the last few years have been bleak for the Czechs at the NHL draft, and worse for the Slovaks. The latter have Tomas Tatar and Richard Panik to look forward to; not only do they have awesome names, but they play up to them as well. In the longer run, though, it'll be interesting to see if Finland, the Czechs and the Slovaks can keep up with the other big countries, or if they'll sink to second tier.

All in all, though, the gap between the small and big countries is narrower now than it has ever been, and that's great for hockey. I'm already looking forward to next year.