For the selectors of the Canadian, Russian and Swedish men’s hockey teams, with their abundance of talent, the hard part of filling an Olympic roster is figuring out which top players to leave out. But the selector of the German Olympic team faces a different predicament: He actually wants to leave out some of his most talented players.
“It’s a bit of a tightrope act,” said Uwe Krupp, Germany’s coach and the man who will choose the squad. “We can’t simply take all our NHL players just because they’re NHL players. What about the guys who were here all through the qualifying process and got us into the Olympics? Do I tell them to just step aside?”
The International Ice Hockey Federation’s deadlines for announcing Olympic rosters fall between Christmas and New Year, ahead of the Winter Games in February in Vancouver. But unlike the powerhouses of world hockey, second-tier countries like Germany, currently 12th in the IIHF world rankings, behind Norway and just ahead of Denmark, must find a more delicate balance than simply picking the best players with the appropriate passport.
“We have 10 players in the NHL and AHL, but none of them took part in qualifying,” Krupp said, referring to the brief tournament in Hanover, Germany, last February that got Germany into the Olympics with nail-biting 2-1 victories against Austria and Slovenia.
All the players on that German roster were domestically based.
“It could be disruptive if I left off some of those guys who battled to get us into the Olympics and whatever chance of success we have in Vancouver will be the result of our whole team, not a few individuals,” Krupp said.
It seems certain that when Krupp announces his 23-man roster on Dec. 30, he will pick players who are top-line players with their NHL clubs, like forwards Jochen Hecht of the Buffalo Sabres and Marco Sturm of the Boston Bruins, and defensemen Christian Ehrhoff of the Vancouver Canucks and Dennis Seidenberg of the Florida Panthers.
But some Germans playing in North America may not be called, said Krupp, who played 15 seasons as an NHL defenseman and scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal for Colorado in 1996.
“If a player is on an NHL roster but isn’t getting a lot of ice time, he may not be ready to step in for us,” Krupp said.
He likened the situation to international soccer, in which players may be on prestigious clubs but cannot get off the bench and into games, hindering their chances of being selected to play for their country.
Such players may include Philip Gogulla and Felix Schuetz, two 22-year-old draft choices of the Sabres now playing with Portland in the American Hockey League.
Christoph Schubert of the Atlanta Thrashers may be another such player. He is on the Thrashers’ third defense pairing and skates an average of 15 minutes a game, on the bubble in terms of significant ice time.
Even though Schubert, 27, played for Germany in the last two Olympics and at several other competitions in recent years, he said he was not sure whether Krupp would take him to Vancouver.
“He’s said it often enough: Just because you play over here doesn’t mean you’re going to make the Olympics,” Schubert said. “It’s his decision, he’s the coach. The only thing I know is that I expect he’s going to call in the next couple of weeks if I make the team or not.”
In Vancouver, Germany will play in a difficult preliminary group with Sweden, Finland and Belarus. Sweden’s lineup will consist almost entirely of NHL players, and about 75 percent of Finland’s will be from the NHL. Most of Germany’s players will come from the Deutsche Eishockey Liga (DEL), considered only the seventh-best league in Europe.
Krupp said Germany’s No. 1 goalie would probably be Dimitri Patzold, who played briefly with the San Jose Sharks and is having a rough season for ERC Ingolstadt of the DEL. Krupp said he might also call on Thomas Greiss, San Jose’s little-used backup, or Dmitrij Kotschnew of Spartak Moscow in the Russian Kontinental Hockey League.
Another Ingolstadt player, Thomas Greilinger, is a candidate at forward. Greilinger is the DEL’s leading scorer this season, five years after dropping out of hockey because of a knee injury and ballooning to more than 127kg. In 2006 to 2007, he was playing in Germany’s fourth-tier league; in 2007 to last year, he was in the third tier.
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