Czech Olympic Men's Hockey Team

With the Olympics quickly approaching, many hockey fans are lamenting the fact that NHL players will not be making the trip to Beijing to compete. However, that won’t stop us from speculating about what teams might have looked like, and who could have come out on top. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a potential version of the team from Czechia (formerly known as the Czech Republic).

The Roster

Analysis

This team is likely the weakest of those that I will be analyzing. My criteria was that the countries I analyzed had to have enough NHL players to field a full team without using any players from other leagues, and Czechia barely got there on the defensive end. Up front, I did make a minor exception by choosing David Krejci because he was an excellent NHL player just a year ago and left the league for personal reasons. This makes him one of the only players in the tournament who is on a strong team and would have been there regardless of the NHL’s position, meaning he could make a huge impact.

Up front, this team does have a strong first line. David Pastrnak can be an X-factor for any team, with an incredible ability to score goals and to create offense overall. Tomas Hertl is having a career year in San Jose, and he’s another guy who can score as well. Finally, Palat is one of the most consistent players in the league, and he has shown that he has what it takes to win these last couple of years in Tampa. The other line to watch out for is actually the third line. Both Zadina and Zacha are recent top-10 NHL draft picks (they actually both went 6th), and Necas is a difference maker on an excellent Carolina team. All three of them are also top-notch shooters, and form the kind of group that could really heat up if they get some bounces. The fourth line includes Kampf and Kase from Toronto because they’ve proven their ability to form a solid shut-down unit, which should be further assisted by the speedy Filip Chytil on the wing.

The defense corps of this team is where things start to come off the rails. It’s not all bad - Hronek has been one of Detroit’s top scorers this year, and Rutta and Gudas play important roles on winning teams. Gudas is also crazy enough to scare people because he’s totally prepared to take a run at someone. Rather than put these guys together and play a strategy of mostly rolling two defense pairs, which will get tiring over the course of the tournament, I’ve tried to put them all on their natural right side so that they can each anchor a pairing. On the left side, Simek quietly plays decent minutes in San Jose, Kempny can contribute in Washington but has had some injury issues, and Zboril frankly isn’t very good (he’s only played in 10 games this year despite being healthy), but the team’s depth is somewhat limited and Hajek is no better.

This team’s contenders in the crease present some interesting decisions but not a lot of attractive options. Coming into this season, the presumed starter likely would have been Petr Mrazek, but he has been injured frequently and even when he has been healthy, he has played poorly. Pavel Francouz has the best stats of the group (2.03 GAA and .932 save percentage), but he gets to play in Colorado, which means that his stats may be a bit bloated. I’ve chosen Vitek Vanecek to be the starter because he’s played about half of the games in Washington and played pretty well, but the person from Czechia who has started the most games this year is actually Karel Vejmelka of Arizona, so he might have got a look as well. The bottom line is that none of these guys are at the standard of the other goalies I’ve written about, so if someone emerged as the hot hand in practice or had a good start, they likely would have gotten the nod moving forward.

Unless one of their goalies miraculously got hot or Pastrnak went on an absolute tear, it’s hard to envision this team making it too far. It seems as though a quarter-final exit likely would have been their fate due to their poor ability to defend.

*Sources: QuantHockey, NHL.com