What is the greatest Olympic hockey team of all-time?
The Olympics are just weeks away now. We’ll soon be treated to best-on-best action on the men’s and women’s side. Reflecting on the many tourneys we’ve seen at the Winter Olympics over the years…What is your pick for the greatest Olympic hockey team of all-time? It’s a highly subjective question. You can choose a male or female team. You can pick based on roster talent or based on what that roster achieved. Good luck!
MATT LARKIN: The 2002 Canadian men’s team gets my vote, and it was such a stacked group that I almost feel guilty picking it before you poor saps get a chance to respond. The team was absolutely littered with legends, Hall of Famers and borderline Hall of Famers. Marty Brodeur, Curtis Joseph and Ed Belfour in net. Al MacInnis, Chris Pronger, Scott Niedermayer and Rob Blake anchoring the D-corps. Mario Lemieux, Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, Jarome Iginla, Brendan Shanahan, Eric Lindros and more among the forward group. That team caught so many iconic players in their late primes and mixed in some dominant players in their early-to-mid-primes to boot. It’s hard to picture Sidney Crosby losing anything, but I think Canada’s 2002 squad beats the 2010 one head-to-head.
STEVEN ELLIS: I’m going with the 2014 Canadian men’s team. There wasn’t a weak link on the roster. Sure, they nearly lost to Latvia… but they didn’t. The fact that they only allowed two goals in the playoff round was absolutely special, and they dominated Sweden in the title game. That tournament won’t be remembered for its excellent hockey (2018 was much better from an entertainment perspective), but that Canadian team was full of current and future Hockey Hall of Famers in a way that I don’t think the 2026 team will match.
PAUL PIDUTTI: I’ll take the 2006 Canadian women’s team that never broke a sweat in Turin. The asterisk in the event was that Team USA was shockingly bounced in the other semi-final, so Canada never faced their arch-rivals. I’m not sure it mattered. Team Canada was late in its stretch of winning nine of the first 10 IIHF World Championships held. This might have been the pinnacle of any program in hockey history. There are only 14 female Hall of Fame players elected to date and six were on this Team Canada roster. Led by 27-year-old Hayley Wickenheiser at the peak of her powers (17 points in five games), the squad also featured Hall of Famers Caroline Ouelette (26), Jayna Hefford (28), Jennifer Botterill (26), and 40-year-old legend Danielle Goyette. The only female Hall of Fame goalie, Kim St-Pierre, didn’t even start the gold medal game. Canada outscored the opposition 46-2 and outshot opponents 44-11 on average while cruising to gold over Sweden.
ANTHONY TRUDEAU: Team Canada was always loaded during the original “best-on-best” era but never replicated the wire-to-wire dominance of the 1984 Soviet Union Team. The Soviets were on the warpath after their embarrassment in ’80, having plowed through the 1981 Canada Cup and a trifecta of World Championships in the leadup to the Games. In the last Olympic tournament before professionals could compete, the Soviet “amateurs,” led by Hall-of-Famers Slava Fetisov, Igor Larionov, and Sergei Makarov, wiped out the field with disdainful ease. The Soviets scored a comical 8.4 goals per game during group play before finishing out the tournament with a combined score of 48-5. Vladislav Tretiak shut out the equally phony amateurs of Czechoslovakia in the de facto gold-medal game to close the book on a brilliant international career and drop his tournament goals-against average to 0.67.
SCOTT MAXWELL: Just the Olympics? So I can’t choose Team North America from the 2016 World Cup of Hockey? Well in that case, I’ll go with the 2014 Canadian team as well. Some of that is due to the fact my hockey-watching experience basically began with the gold-medal game in 2010, so 2014 was my only complete experience of a best-on-best Olympic tournament (and even then, I missed half of them because they took place during high school and my english teacher insisted “it’s just Norway and Austria, they won’t be close games, we don’t need to watch them”). But what a team to witness. Carey Price’s dominance in the tournament alone was fantastic, but the full team effort from every player just worked so well. How often do two defensemen lead your team in goals and points? And then seeing Sidney Crosby finally get his first goal in the gold-medal game capped off the tournament well, even if it was not as iconic as his other gold-medal goal. Oh, and this team’s eighth defenseman was the reigning Norris Trophy winner (P.K. Subban) and their final forward addition was the reigning Art Ross winner (Martin St. Louis). Not many teams have that on reserve.
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