[sureLoss]

First Iginla update I have heard in a while:

http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/j...-olympic-team/

“As good a player as Jarome has been, as good a man as he is, if he’s not playing, it’s hard to give yourself opportunity for a fair evaluation, quite honestly, of what he might be able to do in the Olympic Games,” Tom Renney, president and CEO of Hockey Canada, said Wednesday morning at Team Canada’s jersey unveiling event in Toronto.

“It’s tough to go from zero to 60 as a 40-year-old.”

The Edmonton native was invited to suit up for Canada’s national team at November’s Olympic tune-up tournament, the Karjala Cup in Helsinki, but declined. The winger recently underwent a procedure to clean up loose particles in his hip.

Following Helsinki, the next major step in Canada’s roster evaluation is Moscow’s Channel One Cup in mid-December.

If he still holds 2018 Olympic dreams, it’s safe to assume Iginla would need to be active by then. Iginla scored 14 goals and 13 assists — low totals, by his standards — in 80 games for the Los Angeles Kings and Colorado Avalanche in 2016-17.

“Jarome is going to have to be playing hockey,” Renney asserted. “It’s one thing to talk about names that could play. If those people aren’t playing….” The sentence hung unfinished.

“We’ve talked to Jarome, we’ve talked to Shane Doan … only to get their feel on things and to give them an opportunity to understand where we are in the grand scheme of things and how we want to approach this so there are no surprises.”