TORONTO -- It was like the NHL All-Star Game or the Stanley Cup Final times four. Thursday was media day for the World Cup of Hockey 2016, and instead of two teams taking turns in the spotlight, there were eight.
For more than six hours they did interviews at Air Canada Centre, the podiums starting along the wall of a basketball practice court, stretching along another wall and spilling out into the third-floor concourse.
At times there were more players than reporters to talk to them even here in the Center of the Hockey Universe. Drew Doughty of Team Canada, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a two-time Stanley Cup champion, the reigning winner of the Norris Trophy as the best defenseman in the NHL, sat alone for a few minutes, sipping a bottle of water and waiting.
It underscored what is special about this particular tournament: not just the quantity of talent, but the quality. These are 184 of the best players in the world in one place at one time. This might be the most competitive hockey tournament of all time from top to bottom, Olympics included.
"I'll tell you right now: There's never, ever, ever been eight teams like this," said Team Europe coach Ralph Krueger, who has been playing and coaching in international tournaments since 1981. "I believe this is the strongest tournament in the history of hockey without a doubt, without a second, if you just look at the pure level of games."
The criticism of this World Cup is that it is not a true best-on-best tournament because it includes Team North America, comprised of players 23 or younger from Canada and the United States, and Team Europe, comprised of European players from outside the Czech Republic, Finland, Sweden and Russia.
How can you call it a best-on-best tournament if Connor McDavid can't play for Team Canada or Jack Eichel can't play for Team USA? Isn't it just a gimmick if Anze Kopitar and Zdeno Chara aren't playing for Slovenia or Slovakia, respectively, but some made-up team instead?
But the point was to include more of the best players than would have been included otherwise and to raise the overall level of competition. In a sense, this is more of a best-on-best tournament than anything we have seen before.
Six nations have won Olympic medals since the NHL started participating in the Olympics in 1998: Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the United States. It's no coincidence that those are the same six nations competing intact in this World Cup and that the NHL and the NHL Players' Association tried to boost the rest of the field.
Had the NHL and NHLPA included two nations instead of Team North America and Team Europe, it would have had two weak teams and left out some excellent players entirely. As Krueger said: "This World Cup would have definitely had two nations that wouldn't have been able to play competitively here."
"In the beginning, [the format] was maybe a little bit weird," Team Finland goaltender Pekka Rinne said. "But right now it feels like it was the right decision because for all the fans and for us other players, you know that you have all the best players in the same tournament. I think that was the goal. I like that. It's going to be exciting for everybody to see those guys on the ice."
What about the upsets and near-misses we always remember? Well, we remember them because they're rare. We tend to forget the more common Olympic mismatches.
Belarus, a team with one NHL player, upset Sweden, a team stacked with NHL stars, in the quarterfinals of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics 4-3 after Vladimir Kopat shot a puck from the neutral zone that handcuffed goaltender Sweden goaltender Tommy Salo late in the third period.
Incredible. What happened next? Not so incredible. Belarus lost to Canada in the semifinals 7-1 and to Russia in the bronze-medal game 7-2.
Latvia, a team with one NHL player, nearly upset Canada, the defending and eventual gold medalist, in the quarterfinals of the 2014 Sochi Olympics. There was drama thanks to Latvia goaltender Kristers Gudlevskis. The game was tied 1-1 until Shea Weber scored on the power play in the third period. But how good was the game really? Canada outshot Latvia 57-16.
"It's not a pretty game, and that won't happen here because of the quality of the teams," Krueger said.
Each team in this tournament played three pretournament games. No one went 3-0-0. No one went 0-3-0.
Team North America showed what it could do in the first two games when it outscored Team Europe by a combined 11-4.
"You look at the tournament, it's really up for grabs," Eichel said. "You can take Canada, U.S., those teams that have usually done well or are the favorites. But I think that anybody can really do well. I think that's the mindset that we have to have going into it. If we do that and we're not intimidated or too overly confident in ourselves, then we'll do well."
Team Europe rebounded by defeating Team Sweden, considered perhaps the second-best team in the tournament to Team Canada, 6-2. Team Czech Republic, considered perhaps the weakest of the national teams, went 2-1-0, defeating Russia 2-1 in a shootout and Team North America 3-2.
"It's definitely different," Team Canada forward Ryan Getzlaf said. "Sometimes you go into some of those games, and you know you don't really have to have your best to compete and get an opportunity to win. You definitely don't have that at this tournament. All the teams are elite teams, and you're going to have to compete on a nightly basis."
