Larry Brooks

Larry Brooks

NHL

Olympic hockey so much better than mundane midseason NHL

Whoa boy, what a blow. No games between Buffalo and Florida, or Edmonton and Winnipeg, or Ottawa and Washington, or for that matter, no games at all involving the Original 30 who pick up their sticks in September right around when the NFL is a week or two into its season, and then play, and play, and play, and play, one night after another, one numbing same game after another, until finally finishing up when Major League Baseball is almost halfway through its schedule.

No games of homogeneous style for about three weeks in a schedule in which every game is billed as so important that none truly is, not with the losers’ point that turns math and common sense on their heads by producing more than two-thirds of the NHL’s teams into “above-.500” outfits.

No games while the greatest hockey players in the world participate in The Games, in what has become the sport’s quadrennial Mount Everest of competition and in which hockey sets itself apart on the grander scale that, in fact, is Olympian.

Pittsburgh coach Dan Bylsma, who has the pleasure of earning his living by coaching the world’s greatest player, now has the responsibility of devising the strategy to stop Sidney Crosby so that No. 87 can’t mine gold for Canada at the USA’s expense four years after he did it the last time.

This is a thing of beauty, this hockey tournament in Sochi that commences on Wednesday with King Henrik of Lundqvist, who has become the quintessential citizen of New York, leading Sweden onto the ice in search of his and his country’s second gold medal in eight years, beginning the quest by leading Tre Kronor against the Czech Republic and Jaromir Jagr, the ageless Wonder of the World who is playing in his fifth Olympics.

The USA has lost two games in the pair of NHL-inclusive Olympics that have been played in North America, both to Canada, both in the gold medal game, first in Salt Lake City in 2002 and then in Vancouver in 2010. In the two tournaments across the oceans, in Nagano in 1998 and Turin in 2006, the Yanks have won two games.

Bylsma has Buffalo’s Ryan Miller, who emerged as Team USA’s face of 2010, and he has Los Angeles’ Jonathan Quick, the Conn Smythe Cup winner of 2012 from whom to choose in goal, but one doesn’t have to be a student of geography to recognize Sochi is not next door.

Pride will drive the Russians and Ilya Kovalchuk, who “retired” from the NHL to indeed go home again and who is playing at home with and against the best in the world for the first time since April, and on a team formidable enough in nets that last year’s Vezina winner, Columbus’ Sergei Bobrovsky, will begin as the back-up to this year’s Vezina front-runner, Colorado’s Semyon Varlamov, who both carry the torch lit by Vladislav Tretiak.

John Tavares, who might be the second-best player on the planet, has been skating in practice for Canada on a fourth line, which isn’t to be confused with the fourth line, or at least not with any fourth line in the history of the sport. From off-Broadway to the world’s stage for the Islanders’ transcendent star, whose goaltending — Carey Price, Roberto Luongo, Mike Smith — seems less of an exclamation point and more of a question mark.

So it begins, best-against-best, for pride and country. No games in Newark for a while, none in Raleigh. You’ll pardon the interruption, because Wednesday it begins with Sweden-Czech Republic and then on Thursday it’s USA-Slovakia; Canada-Norway (with the Zucc); and Russia-Slovenia.

And the whole world will be watching.