Making it Look Easy

Congratulations to Canada's Junior Hockey team, whose overwhelming dominance of this year's tournament makes them clearly the best junior hockey team ever assembled.

As an aside (and to make a dull entry a bit more interesting), I find it odd how people have debates over which sports teams are the best ever, in which they compare teams from different eras. In every measurable field of athletic endeavour, the athletes of today are far better than those of the past.

Similarly today's athletes in team sports are bigger, stronger, faster, in better shape and better trained than those of the past. I for one, am very confident that the 2004 Edmonton Oilers could easily defeat the 1986 Oilers.

As a further aside, the argument that the NHL is suffering from dilution of talent is equally nonsense. Just the infusion of foreign talent alone would have been enough to compensate from going from 21 teams (as in the high scoring 80's) to the current 30. Add in the constant improvements in the overall talent base and it seems pretty clear that the league has a greater depth of talented players than ever before. In fact, it's more likely that scoring is down because there's too much talent (especially in net and on defense), rather than the other way around.