Quote:
Originally Posted by midniteowl
Is this the least talented team, also have the least heart?
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The 2003 team in Halifax was probably the least talented that I remember seeing, but they had a lot of heart (and Fleury had an insane tournament in net with his yellow Screaming Eagles pads). It's kind of weird because the number of regular NHLers the team would go onto have is actually quite high compared to a lot of other teams I would consider more talented. But they played hard and the Halifax crowd was fully behind them. Also probably my favorite era of Canadian jerseys were that 02/03 set. But there is the elephant of the sexual assault allegations that cast a pretty heavy shadow on the nostalgia of that team.
That era of Russian teams just really clicked. In '02 it was Chistov, Frolov and Svitov who looked like men among boys (which is funny for a guy like Chistov, but Svitov truly looked like the second coming of Bobby Holik and worthy of his 3rd Overall selection). Also a lot of Flames reserve list players like Trubachev, Taratukhin (who both scored in the 03 gold medal game) and the infamous duo of Andrei Medvedev and Ruslan Zainullin. Which is weird to think about when we went for so long without any Russians in the system after that.
The 03 Russian team lost their big line but a lot of experience carried over (and the debut of Ovechkin) and were just a really, really good team. I still remember people groaning that Detroit looked to have another breakout star in Igor Grigorenko with how great a tournament he had (also one of the big 'what ifs' of the 2000s given the freak injury and subsequent complications basically derailed his NHL trajectory).