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Conquest by Soviets
Proves NHL's Best
The National Hockey League is faced with a new dilemma after their crushing defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union - where do they go from here? It would seem the NHL had all the 'big stars,' hockey's top bananas as far as player wealth was concerned, but it all boiled down to one thing - they didn't have a system. The Soviets did. There will be post mortems into the long hours and nights ahead to determine first, should the NHL continue to risk pride and prestige trying to break down a hockey machine that won't bend, or, second if their peers insist on playing the USSR again, then the NHL had better get off their collective butts and start shaping a program that will allow them to compete with the supermen of the Soviet without having to sustain the embarrassment and disappointment that Team NHL had to endure when they skated off the Madison Square Garden ice the night of Feb. 11. It really isn't fair to the NHL performers themselves. They gave it all they had in the three-game Challenge Cup series and came away dejected, whipped and red-faced for another year after losing two of three games. they were outscored, outshot, outplayed, outskated and out-muscled and now must wonder what they were doing in the so called series of the century in the first place. They were obviously not prepared. Today, they will be asking themselves; "will we ever be ready?" Bill Torrey, the Team NHL general manager, said he couldn't fault the players because they had just come off a tough first half of the schedule with little or no rest. Physically, they were not prepared. This was obvious after their pathetic performance in the third period of game two and the entire third game when they were out of it from the start. Still, Torrey and the NHL must accept some of the blame. They were instrumental in picking the team and they had a say in arranging the series. They knew what they were getting themselves into and they were playing a tough foe at the time when the NHL was supposedly at its peak. Like the man said before it all began - we should have no excuses. Serge Savard, the Canadiens' defense great who did his utmost to make it look respectable throughout the series, may have said it all when he declared, "we've been developing goons in the last 10 years instead of hockey players." It certainly showed in the Challenge Cup series. Most hockey people were emphatic that the NHL begin to take an entirely new approach to international hockey. It is now apparent that a North American team - whether it be an All Star aggregation or the Stanley Cup champion Canadiens - isn't going to succeed against the Soviet system until we start employing some of their tactics. Conditioning became the prime decider in the series. The Superb Soviets were skating as strong at the finish as they were at the start. On the other hand, the NHL looked listless, tired and physically beaten into the ice. Where does the NHL go from here?
That's a good question and something the hockey barons of the league will
have to answer. Certainly, they had to be pleased with the monetary return
and the world exposure the series brought, but they can't reconcile
themselves after what happened on the ice. 
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