As the NHL all-star weekend takes over Las Vegas, Team Canada takes the ice in Beijing without the country's biggest stars – The Globe and Mail

The NHL set up its little kiosk in Las Vegas over the weekend, hoping to do some market outreach.

The league’s biggest brainwave? Floating a podium into the middle of the fountain in front of the Bellagio hotel. On that stretch of water – possibly the single tackiest place on Planet Earth – they held a mini-skills competition. Columbus Blue Jackets defenceman Zach Werenski won it.

“I’ve been to Vegas a few times,” Werenski told reporters afterward, channelling Sally Field at the Oscars. “I feel like every time you come here, you walk by [the fountain]. You watch the fountains go off.”

You watch the fountains go off – he makes it sound so magical.

Standing in a floodlit swamp, in front of a bunch of confused rubes from South Carolina and Sunderland, flipping pucks at a target.

Imagine Tom Brady or LeBron James being convinced to do this. Try harder. Try as hard as you can. Now stop before you pop a blood vessel.

What was this crowd of yokels thinking? It wasn’t, “I am standing in the presence of athletic greatness.” It was, “When did Cirque du Soleil get so boring?” But I presume that like all visitors to Vegas, they were sunburned and day drunk and happy to doing anything that’s free.

What a great hockey moment that must have been.

Around the same time, Team Canada was hitting the practice ice here in Beijing. They blew off their first couple of days in the city because of a) jet lag and b) the opening ceremony.

Now here they were in the practice rink jammed in behind Beijing’s second-best arena. Maybe 20, 25 people watched them take the ice, mostly to make sure they were all there and not telling COVID-19 fibs.

They weren’t wearing nameplates. Aside from a few known commodities, you couldn’t tell who was who.

Once again, the men’s representatives of the best hockey country in the world at the sport’s premier international competition are largely anonymous, even to their own people.

Without NHL stars, Canada’s men’s hockey team is an inscrutable mix of youngsters and veterans

Canada’s men’s hockey team trying to bond on and off ice

“I think it’s pretty sad,” said one of the few name brand players, Josh Ho-Sang. He was talking about all the NHLers who should be here and aren’t. “I feel really bad for those guys. … They may never get this chance again.”

Really? Do you think the NHL will ever be back?

“I hope so,” said Eric Staal, the only bona fide Canadian superstar (if this was 2008). “It’s great for the future of hockey. It needs to be a sport that’s played worldwide.”

Which is a nice way of saying that assembling a bunch of guys from the AHL and assorted European leagues isn’t accomplishing that goal.

Nobody here has as much to gain as Ho-Sang and Staal. Both probably believe that a good tournament gets them back to the bigs.

And even these guys think this is a bummer. Even they can see how badly the NHL screwed up this golden ticket. What does that tell you?

Every Winter Olympics starts off star-challenged. This one may be more barren of big names than any this century. Who’s the hot property up front? Who’s going to get people who think biathlon is running forward and backward to tune in? Eileen Gu, Chloe Kim, Jamaican bobsledders. That’s about it.

Canada’s hockey players should be filling that celebrity vacuum. If Crosby, MacKinnon and McDavid (neither first names nor nameplates required), that practice rink on Saturday would have been packed.

Instead, what you get is a bunch of volunteers lining up to take pictures with Owen Power. Not because they have any clue who he is. But because he is the biggest guy on the Canadian team, he’s standing still and he’s too nice to say no.

Team Canada should be filling the global sports content vacuum at the beginning and then again at the end. Forget about priceless. This would have been two weeks of unbuyable publicity.

I’m no marketing genius, but it seems to me that making that sort of splash in a country of 1.4 billion people who are just coming around on cold-weather sport might be a good idea.

The failure to see that obvious truth is so large, so pan-systemic, so bafflingly self-defeating, that it hasn’t provoked much controversy. One bad roster decision sets the NHL commentariat alight. A total, top-to-bottom failure to understand what is in the league’s best interests is apparently too complicated to discuss.

That’s how the NHL gets away with it (and other things). They wait a while, and then they fly everyone to Vegas instead. Problem successfully ignored.

On Sunday, Canada practised again. After the players had drifted off, team GM Shane Doan dropped by in his street clothes.

This must have seemed like a sexier job a couple of months ago, but you wouldn’t know that from hearing Doan talk about it.

He waxed on about the possibilities and what it means to wear the Maple Leaf. He analogized it to three similar sporting experiences – playing rugby for New Zealand, soccer for Brazil and cricket for India. Being part of teams that are not allowed to lose.

“That’s the best part of our tradition,” Doan said. “The expectation.”

Is it?

You know what Doan’s trying to say, but it’s getting harder to believe the underlying premise. If that expectation existed, the NHL’s best would be here.

I’m not talking about bargaining their way to the Olympics. I’m talking about climbing into the wheel well of a China-bound jetliner if that’s what it took.

Instead, the heirs to that special hockey tradition got a look at what a hassle Beijing was going to be and said, “Pass.”

Would Brazil’s best soccer players or India’s best cricketers take a powder on a World Cup because going might cost them a few bucks? Because someone at their day job told them they had to stay back and work out all the hours they’d missed in December and January?

No, they would not. Every single one of them would go to the World Cup if it was being staged in Hell. No league could deny them. If one tried, it would spark insurrection.

But here’s the NHL and its players with their thinking caps on, trying to figure out how a couple of weeks in the global spotlight might affect the Leafs’ ability to make cap space for a back-up goalie. This is the important work of hockey. Let guys who have nothing better to do handle the little things, like the Olympics. Canadian hockey’s tradition still carries an expectation, but it’s changed. Now it’s an expectation that we can lord over the sport whenever we feel like it, but only if it’s convenient.

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