WarriorofTime
Registered User
- Jul 3, 2010
- 30,058
- 18,591
Depth advantage likely matters more as you get to countries that have third lines of players that can't hang, i.e., weren't at least high-end NHL 1st line (or an equivalent of NHL 1st line players for Iron Curtain) players.Maybe because Gretzky-Orr are so special, but it is tempting to go the other way around, Canada third best teams against other country third-best team seem a safer bet for Canada than playing against Fetisov, Jagr, Hasek, etc...
But more you think about it, dealing with Lemieux-Gretzky-Orr for 60 minutes..
Canada lost a game to the Swiss in the Olympics, Soviet to the US college player, even in a 4 of 7 hockey does not feel safe like Soccer, Football or Basketball, there a bit of Baseball like quality to it if the gap is not extreme and you face 1994 Fedorov-Bure, peak Tretiak/Vasilivski
I actually had basketball in the back of my mind with the "turn fatigue off" thing. Basketball is a sport that involves a lot of high variance activity, three point shooting in particular, where this year, the worst NBA team to best NBA team in terms of made percentage is a range of 34.5 % to 38.9 %. It is also much more of a 'your turn, my turn' alternating possession kind of sport as opposed to hockey where one team can dominate possession for longer (rebounding is the x-factor to negate that general principle). But in basketball, the star players both play much longer and you can more deliberately run an offense through them compared to a faster moving sport at hockey at 5 on 5 play. I would say the fact that you can essentially spam Michael Jordan or LeBron James all game is why basketball sees less variance than hockey in my opinion, where Gretzky and Orr still come off the ice most of the time.
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