Posted Tuesday, March 09, 2010 11:34 AM
From Stephen Brunt of the Globe and Mail
Published on Monday, Mar. 08, 2010
There are times, in professional
sport and elsewhere, when you need more than a competent manager. You
need visionary leadership, and right now, hockey in general, and the NHL in particular, finds itself at such a crossroads.
If that wasn't obvious before the 2010 men's Olympic tournament, it
certainly was by the time the festivities in Vancouver concluded with
the storybook finish in the gold-medal game.
In a lifetime, there have been precious few perfect expressions of
the sport's beauty – its speed, finesse and physical power – and just
about all of those have involved international competition in one form
or another (including the fondly remembered New Year's Eve clash
between the Montreal Canadiens and Central Red Army in 1975).
Obviously, it's a whole lot easier to create and maintain those
high-end aesthetics with only the best players in the world on the... [More]