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National hockey team at odds with the NHL

'Undercover' plan for coach to lure players

By František Bouc
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 20th, 2008 issue

Ten years ago, the national hockey team brought an outpouring of national pride by winning the gold at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. The country was enthralled with its players, particularly those in the National Hockey League, who drove the team to victory.
Today that Olympic glory seems far removed. The national teams are piling up one loss after another in international competition, causing the hockey community to once again look to the NHL.
But this time they are looking in anger.
While knowing that the national team cannot win without its NHL players, local hockey officials have been taking increasingly strident tones against the North American league, accusing it of stealing players from the country and ruining local hockey.
“We’ve become a supermarket for the NHL, where they get top products at discount prices,” said Zbyněk Kusý, the national team’s general manager. “We are left begging NHL clubs to pay our players while letting them play for the national team in their free time.”
The national team’s head coach, Alois Hadamczik, is planning to leave late this month on a North American tour, hoping to lure some Czech NHL players in for the World Championship in May. The more NHL players on the national team, the stronger it will be, Hadamczik said.
“The days when NHL players merely boosted our team are gone. … Now, we must form the whole team with them in order to be competitive,” he said.
Unlike similar trips in the past, Hadamczik said he plans to meet with the players undercover. Rather than meeting at their stadiums, Hadamczik will conduct talks in hotel lobbies and similar venues. The secrecy is meant to ease relations between the team and the NHL.
“We don’t want to intensify the current tension between us and the NHL,” Kusý said.
Those tensions are now at a peak after the Czech Ice Hockey Association (ČSLH) recently terminated an agreement with the NHL regulating trades involving European players. Last month, the ČSLH canceled the deal, originally intended to last four years, after only half a year. In so doing, they followed the lead of the Russians and Swedes, who had also withdrawn from the pact.
The contract had guaranteed the associations $200,000 (3.5 million Kč) for every European player signed by the NHL, a concession hard won. Yet it quickly became clear that this requirement was doing little to halt the exodus of young players from the European leagues.
“Last season, 59 European players left for North America and only six of them earned NHL contracts,” said ČSLH Secretary Martin Urban. “Still, only seven returned to Europe, and the others ended on farm teams.
“It shows that the NHL teams often just sign players without really wanting them, while harming our leagues and national teams.”
Indeed, the junior hockey teams are flailing on the international circuit. The Under-20 team lost in the quarterfinals of the World Championship, held last month in Pardubice, east Bohemia. Despite the home ice advantage, the team failed to compete against Russia, Sweden or the United States.
“We’ve lost touch with [those teams],” said Miloslav Hořava, the team’s coach.
To stanch the flow of players west, the ČSLH is now ordering Czech clubs to deal with their NHL counterparts separately, free of any European contract.
One possible solution to the Czech-NHL tensions would be an agreement that the NHL only takes players who make the league, allowing lower-level players to return home, Kusý said.
“We respect that the NHL is the best league in the world and it will attract the best players, but we have to find a way to cooperate that will not harm our clubs,” he added.

František Bouc can be reached at fbouc@praguepost.com


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