Make American Hockey great again (Trending Topics)

Earlier this week, even before the ugly loss to Canada which hammered any number of nails into a coffin already riddled with them, myself and others speculated that an early elimination would be the best possible outcome for USA Hockey.

We figured that if this team cobbled together two straight weak performances and were bounced out of a tournament engineered to ensure it didn’t get bounced out, that it would serve as some sort of wakeup call. That these people who paired a questionable-at-best roster with a regrettable-at-best coach would see the results and say to themselves, “Well, we blew it and we know that the old way of doing things is no longer acceptable.”

Then USA Hockey announced that Dean Lombardi, who was in charge of putting together this team pretty much from top to bottom, would be holding a press conference the morning of the US’s final, meaningless game against the Czechs. Specifically, he would address the team’s failings and his role in it.

Many assumed this meant we could expect something of a hat-in-hand, foot-shuffling apology to USA Hockey fans who probably should have seen this coming.

What we got instead was, well… It was breathtaking.

It included a line about how no one could beat up Dean Lombardi over this performance more than he already had himself.

Let’s give it a whirl anyway.

His big regret? Not the roster construction. Not the coaching decision. But rather: That the team wasn’t “ready” to play against Europe.

I mean, sure. They clearly were not. No game plan was evident in that one and they lost 3-0 to a team they should have beaten. One that ended up needing overtime to beat a poor Czech team in its second game. One with two bought-out defensemen patrolling the blue line. Say what you want about the US roster, but at least all those guys have NHL jobs. Most of them even deserve those jobs!

In fact, Lombardi incredibly doubled down on his roster selection, saying that when he put together a skill-first roster and compared it to Canada’s, he didn’t really see a way forward for the United States. That’s a pretty amazing take, all things considered.

Because, well, no kidding. You could put together a global All-Star team and still probably not come up with a team that has as much depth up-front as Canada. This even after multiple injuries forced some elite talent off the roster.

“I’ll be honest: we’re not as deep as Canada skill-wise,” Tortorella said. “Not sure USA hockey will like me saying that, but it’s the truth. It’s a situation where I still think, in our mind, we could not just skill our way through Canada. That’s our first thought. I’ve been in situations against Canada, this one’s different because it happened so quickly. That’s why we went to this with our team, to build identity and handle momentum swings. We failed.”

It goes without saying that you can’t expect to grit your way past a team of future Hall of Famers more than once or twice in any sizable set of games. The US burned through that in the round robin of the 2010 Olympics, and again in the pre-tournament opener. Once Canada had a good look at what the US presented it early on, the competition was over. After the US opened its 3-1 lead in the first 36 minutes of that first pre-tournament game, Canada outscored 11-5 it over the following 144 minutes. Inevitable, really.

Lombardi mentioned earlier, too, that he didn’t think these results were necessarily an indictment of the thinking that went into building this team.

“We don’t have enough skill,” Tortorella added. “There’s some coming as you can see, especially up the middle for USA Hockey. Would’ve been nice to have them with us now, but that’s not how the tournament was run.”

Of course, Canada would have been able to add Aaron Ekblad instead of Jay Bouwmeester, and Connor McDavid instead of any number of marginally inferior centers who end up playing wing next to a former Hart Trophy winner. And USA Hockey would have probably been more than happy to invite Justin friggin’ Abdelkader instead of Auston Matthews anyway, because it’s not like Lombardi didn’t get asked why all the US skill players — Kyle Okposo, Phil Kessel, Tyler Johnson, Justin Faulk, hell, even Bobby Ryan — got left at home.

Of course that came up. And here’s Lombardi’s answer:

“If you’re talking about Justin Abdelkader, Blake Wheeler, Brandon Dubinsky, Ryan Kesler, David Backes, I’ll take those guys any day,” Lombardi said. “Any day. Is that who you’re talking about? You’re going to have to play against those guys in a little while, but that’s basically the tradeoff. Those guys have big time heart and when I talk about caring, they’d be the nucleus of the caring and they compete and they can play for me any day.”

The Nucleus Of The Caring?

What the actual hell does even mean?

(And also, including Blake Wheeler, who averages almost 70 points every 82 games over the last FIVE seasons, in a group with those guys further shows what’s wrong with how they evaluate players. Wheeler’s maybe one of the 15 best wings in the entire sport, and Lombardi’s talking about him like he went 20-22-42 with 195 hits last season. It’s incredible.)

The implication of course is that Kessel et al do not care, or that the level at which they care does not do enough to bridge the gap between how much they Should Care and how much Kesler, Backes, Abdelkader and Dubinsky Do Care.

Here’s the issue with this line of thinking: No one on earth except these brainiacs would ever have even thought the problem was a lack of caring or effort. Everyone outside the 35 or so people on the team or part of the decision-making process thought the problem was the lack of the team being any goddamn good.

One of the worst coaches in the NHL running a team with Jack Johnson and David Backes in semi-important roles was always going to make this outcome a possibility. When you let that coach health-scratch Dustin Byfuglien, one of the better defensemen in the world, for Game 1, you make it a near-certainty. And then, when you have a guy like Dubinsky you brought specifically to cross-check Sidney Crosby into another concussion, and you scratch him for the game against Canada, your process ends up with as many bullet holes in it as Sonny Corleone at a toll booth.

The answers have been laid at their feet, written in 72-point Impact: “You [expletive]’d up!”

Lombardi doesn’t see it as a problem.

“Of the four major sports, I think that our game allows emotion, competitiveness, caring about each other, to close that gap more than any other sport,” he said. “And that’s why I think it’s the greatest game. There’s no doubt in my mind that the formula has worked. We’ve won two Stanley Cups. The first thing, yes, we had talent, no question about it. But the reason we won, we were a frickin’ team. And that was the culture. And then I come back to say, OK, that’s the way we have to go about this.”

This is a classic case of Bruins-itis: Really good team has elite players at every position — or at least, in the case of Jonathan Quick, a perfectly good player who had an amazing run — and dominates everyone on its way to a Cup. Lombardi’s team did that twice. And his takeaway? “We were a team first.” This might amaze you, but it’s so de rigueur from USA Hockey as to be laughable.

Another hurdle the US couldn’t overcome, according to Lombardi? The turnaround time for this tournament. After all, from the day training camps opened to the first exhibition game, there was less than a week of team-building!

Even in ’96, they were together 30 days and I think you know in terms of bringing a group together and the way we had to be, there could be no maintenance. We had to come together quickly and I think we did that. In terms of the feeling, the discussions with players, are we together? Are we pulling for each other? And that’s where it has to start.

But there is another step you have to get into. It is essentially, you are trying to build a culture, and the reality is can you really do that over five days? And that is really where I pushed myself. Well, is that possible? I guess I do think it is. I haven’t really answered that, but that is one of the things I put down on paper was, “Is that really feasible in essentially a four-day period?”

Tells you everything, doesn’t it? He’s still out here talking about everything the US team had going for it in 1996, like anyone should give a rat’s ass. That team literally had half a dozen Hall of Famers (Chelios, Housley, Hull, LaFontaine, Leetch, and Modano) and a few more borderline guys. How many Hall of Famers you think are on this roster? Is the answer “one?”

This legend of the rag-tag team of superstars that won a short tournament 20 years ago has to get buried on a family plot with 1980 and 1960. The more people obsess over how teamwork made those dreams work, the more USA Hockey is going to end up with crap results and everyone looks around going, “Wha’ happened?”

This all goes without mentioning Lombardi’s meandering ode to the 40-page John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged (don’t read it), in answer to the question of whether he feels like a real idiot for installing John Tortorella as coach. No one goes into that word swamp and comes out alive. It would be worth FJMing if there were literally any kernel of wisdom or self-reflection in there. But believe me, I looked and there isn’t. It’s just him saying, “Well look this might be someone’s fault and I’ve thought about it. The answer is: ‘not Dean Lombardi.’” But like, taking the Donald Trump-inspired I-actually-didn’t-do-the-reading method of “If I talk long enough they’ll eventually let me stop explaining nothing.”

However, there was one last thing he said in answer to that question, and the very last sentence he spewed at the end of a 744-word answer. One salient point to pull triumphant from that morass of nonsense:

“But I think the significance of this, the fact they cared so much, it kind of goes the other way and it kind of snowballed on us.”

That’s right, gang. He’s saying that when it came to beating Canada, this roster and coaching group Cared Too Much.

(For an example of not-caring, John Tortorella later said he thought the person who came off looking worst in the Phil Kessel Tweet situation was Phil Kessel. Tortorella wasn’t mad at all. He was actually laughing about it.)

So that’s their takeaway. That they worked too hard and didn’t have enough time to put a group together that could generate offense through chemistry, and also that the rotten little turds on the North America team ruined everything! Not that anything to do with their thought process is in any way broken.

But even there, a hole in the logic presents itself, because of course it does: You say you cared too much, right? And all the players people say you shouldn’t have brought in the first place were part of your Nucleus Of The Caring, right? So maybe next time you bring the skilled players who care a little bit less, and you end up caring the exact right amount, and you actually beat a half-decent team. Just something to think about

Hindsight’s 20/20 though. Lombardi and Co. couldn’t have foreseen this.

No one could have. Except everyone but Lombardi and Co. Other than that, no one saw this coming. S

o really, it’s not their fault. If you think about. Which they have. Extensively.

And this was before they lost to the [expletive] Czech Republic.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise stated.

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