Team Canada: No Pressure Eh Boys?
By Chris Mckee
All the pressure in the World Cup rests solely upon the shoulders of Team Canada’ s head coach, Mike Babcock.
Every game for Team Canada in the World Cup of Hockey has been played on home soil in one of the countries cathedrals of hockey. Their game times have been scheduled to make sure the spotlight shines brightest upon them and televised to millions of homes across the country.
The entire World Cup of Hockey has been set up to ensure the success of Team Canada. Now it’s time to deliver.
Team Canada has bulldozed its way through the preliminary rounds with merely a scratch on them. Now they are just one win away from earning a spot in the World Cup’s three-game final series set to begin on Tuesday at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto.
Whenever this team has been even remotely tested during their first few games, Canada has simply switched into that next gear that you only see from the elite teams in sports. They’ve simply sapped the energy out of their opponents and finished them off in similar fashion as a Mike Tyson fight circa 1987:
When you scroll through the entire roster of Team Canada and say the names aloud to yourself, “Sidney Crosby, John Tavares, Jonathan Toews, Steven Stamkos and Carey Price” it’s hard to imagine any other outcome than Canada being crowned World Cup champions. So what happens if this team doesn’t deliver?
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We all know that anything can happen in sports; Tyson was eventually knocked out by Buster Douglas, David beat Goliath and Team U.S.A believed in miracles and beat the U.S.S.R in 1980. Which means the inevitable fall guy for Canada if this thing goes south is non-other than head coach Mike Babcock.
The players themselves already have a long list of excuses prepared if they miss out of the inevitable and don’t win the World Cup including, “It’s hard to get your game to its peak level this early in the season” and of course the powers that be at Hockey Canada can point and say, “We thought we provided our coaching staff with the best possible roster of talent to win.” Which means, the weight of Canada’s hopes have been hoisted solely upon the shoulders of Mike Babcock.
In the old days of the U.S.S.R when a team was this talented and competed in an international tournament, it was said that a player or coach would be sent to Siberia as punishment if they didn’t win what was expected. In a way, Babcock is already coaching in hockey’s Siberia as the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Ba-Dum-Tss), so it will be interesting to see the fallout if Babcock doesn’t deliver the goods to hockey fans across Canada.
Next: Team North America has already won the World Cup
Expect the players on Team Canada to play as loose as a Friday night shiny game at High Park in Toronto, but I wouldn’t expect the same approach from its head coach. If Canada wins, the pundits will say that they themselves could’ve coached a team with this much talent to victory.
However, Babcock is mired in a position of damned if you do, but really damned if you don’t.
No pressure eh Mike.