Cincy , I couldn't disagree more with your comments.. Come on now, we are the defending Gold Medal Champs, and the defending World Cup of Hockey champs from last year (same calibre of hockey as Olympics) That is the last two big International Hockey events.. Wayne Gretzky was the GM of both those teams.. Most of the players on this team all played together on last years World Cup winning team, it made a lot of sense to keep most of those players together..
The thing is , both those tournaments we won were on North American Soil in smaller sized NHL rink.. Moving over to Europe to play on the bigger rinks,, that European NHL stars have grown up playing on, is a great equalizer to those European teams..(NHL players that have played international tournaments will mention this in interviews) In this tourney , there were 7 teams that were basically equal (not including the Swiss), yes I'm including the Americans in that group, 4 short years ago they were in the gold medal game with us and now were two of the first teams out of the medal round on a much bigger ice surface.. Basically, what I'm saying is anybody can beat anybody,, especially when a team has problems jelling in a short tournament like Canada did.. Nobody could foresee that happening,, shutout in 3 games??
This team wasn't really that old like you make it sound: Iginla, LeCavlier, Richards, St.Louis, Gagne, Doan , Thornton, Bertuzzi.. these guys are all in their prime.. Sakic and Blake were the only old ones, and they fully deserved to be there. I would of liked to seen Phaneuf there instead of McCabe, but I had no problems with Staal , Spezza and Crosby not there.. It's easy to look back in hindsight, but most experts had this team picked in the summer and were bang on, there were no surprises, they just didn't deliver and mesh well,, it happens.. I think we really missed Scott Niedermeyer and Ed Jovanovski on the backend more then anything,, those are our 2 big puck moving defencemen..