Spotlight burns on Team Canada: Arthur

To fully grasp the intensity of the nation's attention on our newly named Canadian Olympic hockey team, consider that it was revealed Wednesday that Stephen Harper would prorogue Parliament for the next two months.

Our prime minister could have chosen the bustle of Christmas Eve, or the hangover of New Year's Day, or any of the other attention-demolishing moments of the holidays to let slip the suspension of democratically elected debate in this country, such as it is. Plenty of options there.

Instead, he did it while Canada was hotly debating the relative merits of Patrice Bergeron over Martin St. Louis, or Drew Doughty over Jay Bouwmeester. Say what you will about the man in charge of our country, but he's got a sense of timing, if not much of a sense of democracy.

As for the selection of our Olympic hockey team, it wasn't much of a democracy, either, and there were plenty of options there, too. Whenever we go through this exercise, everybody has an opinion, and there is no way not to snub somebody.

So sure, Dallas Stars centre Brad Richards is tied for seventh in the NHL in scoring; unless someone gets hurt, he'll watch at home. Mike Green of Washington is the highest-scoring defenceman in the league and has a better plus-minus than Sidney Crosby; but in large part due to his defensive meltdown in last year's playoffs, he was left off.

'Responsible at both ends'

"He's a tremendous, tremendous talent," executive director Steve Yzerman said. "We just feel that he's not complete yet in the defensive part of his game, and last year's playoffs left an impression upon us. We thought we needed to see him play in a lot of playoff games and play well, and excel in pressure situations, and make good decisions, and be responsible at both ends of the rink to put him on the team."

That's the philosophy, right there — be relentless, play both ways, and excel under spine-cracking pressure. Doughty made the team in part because at the world championships last year he was great in the medal rounds. That's what Canada needs.

Of course, it's rarely the end-of-the-roster guys who determine whether our Olympic hockey teams finishes first (Salt Lake City) or fourth (Nagano) or a disastrous seventh (the mess in Turin, in which seven players named Wednesday had a hand).

So if you're dying over Doughty's inclusion at the age of 20, ask yourself the last time a seventh defenceman was a difference-maker.

No, it's the starting goaltenders and the top-shelf talent that drive the bus.

So the Russians will pack Alexander Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Ilya Kovalchuk, Pavel Datsyuk and Alexander Semin onto their top two lines; the Swedes will enjoy the use of Henrik and Daniel Sedin, Nicklas Backstrom, Henrik Zetterberg and Daniel Alfredsson; the Americans ... well, they'll have Ryan Miller in net, anyway.

And we will have Sidney Crosby and Ryan Getzlaf and Jarome Iginla and Rick Nash and Chris Pronger and the rest.

Golden goalies?

As for the goaltenders, the following is presented without comment: Going into last night's games, the NHL's save percentage leaders include Miller (first), Russians Ilya Bryzgalov and Evgeni Nabokov (third and fifth, respectively), Finland's Miikka Kiprusoff (fourth), Slovakia's Jaroslav Halak (seventh), the Czech Republic's Tomas Vokoun (eighth), and Sweden's Henrik Lundqvist (ninth).

Martin Brodeur and Roberto Luongo were tied for 12th, before Brodeur’s celebratory 32-save shutout Wednesday, while Marc-Andre Fleury is 25th. Boy, if Quebec ever did separate from Canada, who in the world would we find to play in goal?

Ah, there's no sense in worrying about that now. There is more than a month to agonize about the mix of this powerful and delicate machine, over whether this team will score enough (after Canada was shut out three times in 2006), or whether it's a good thing that there are 12 guys under the age of 25, even if Sidney Crosby doesn't really count.

"We didn't specifically go to a younger group or anything; that's just how our roster unfolded, really," Yzerman said. "At the end of the day we just felt like a lot of these players have overtaken our veteran guys, and they were ready to be on this team. It's a new generation."

But will they be ready? This has the potential to be Canada's most pressure-packed hockey tournament since the Summit Series.

And as noted by the CBC's Elliotte Friedman, there were 13 players making their Olympic debuts in Turin, which team brass and some veterans considered the team's chief failing; there will be 14 in Vancouver.

Pressure 'the same'?

Yzerman was asked about pressure and pointed to the fact that all these guys have played in world junior championships on home soil, or played at world championships, or played in front of the six perpetually sold-out hockey arenas that dot our landscape. He even said, at one point, "It's the same."

No, it's not. In no other country would 13 television stations under the banner of the Olympic consortium carry the announcement live; in no other country would its leader use the announcement of the hockey team as political cover.

The spotlights are powering up, and it won't be difficult to melt under the glare. That the San Jose Sharks have an entire forward line on this team just might become cause for concern.

Yes, every one of these players has grown up with pressure, in every rink and every league. But only two (Luongo and Iginla) play on Canadian teams and still face this country's hockey-mad glare each and every day. And none of them will have dealt with this precise situation before.

So yes, these are our boys, and this is our game. They're even playing on an NHL-sized rink. So the unspoken agreement is this: this is the hockey tournament of their lifetimes, right here. And they had better win.