Olympic Hockey Outlook- A Flyers Fan Perspective

February will be a cold month as usual, but for fans of the NHL, it will be especially cold because of the 2 week absence of games on the schedule due to the 2014 winter Olympics. I am actually looking forward to the Olympics this year, mostly because it is the only way to get a hockey fix. Your view on the Olympics is all about perspective, and my perspective is that I will take hockey in any form I can get it in. 

The winter Olympics are extremely underrated. Most people just don’t find the games as appealing as the summer event. Skiing instead of swimming? Figure skating instead of gymnastics? And sports like curling and luge are seemingly laughable to most people. But the winter games are exciting to hockey fans. For those few weeks, the Olympics give us our only chance to watch the game that we love.  

Hockey has a special place in the Olympics, because it takes the fan base of the NHL and puts a divide among North America. During the NHL season, we split up by city and region, but for the Olympics, we split up by country, and there may be no greater Olympic rivalry than that of the United States and Canada for the sport of hockey. The NHL is a league in which there are teams in both the United States and Canada competing against one another on a regular basis, and the players don’t always represent teams in their own country. Then the Olympics come along, and your favorite players are playing for the enemy, and the guys that you never root for are suddenly the ones representing your country. It’s a battle of loyalty and pride like no other. Hockey is special because it captures that national pride in such a different way than other sports. It’s hard not to get excited about it.

As a Flyers fan, this year’s Olympics have brought up some serious debates. Are we happy or mad that our best player wasn’t chosen to represent his country, which also happens to be our enemy in all of this? What about the local player that was blasted by the US committee and left off the roster, does that even change anything? The debates created over the past few weeks in regards to hockey rosters for the Olympics have been interesting to say the least, but the best part is that at the end of the day, none of it matters.

Claude Giroux is a great player, and as fans of his, it is bothersome that he wasn’t chosen for the Canadian Olympic team. But at the same time, now we don’t have to root against him (barring an injury replacement). We can happily watch the US go up against Sidney Crosby and the Canadians and wholeheartedly root against them. We can look at Giroux and see him as what he is to us- the dynamic captain and leader of our favorite hockey team.

Bobby Ryan is from Cherry Hill. Bobby Ryan has never played for the Flyers, yet for some reason we look at him as one of us. The people that follow hockey enough to know about Bobby Ryan were rooting for him to be on the US Olympic team, because he would not only be representing the United States, but Philadelphia as well. Like Giroux, he was snubbed by his country, but unlike with Giroux there was a quite a stir created by this snub because of the in depth story that came out about the selection process and the harsh words spoken about Bobby Ryan as a player. Even though he never played for the Flyers, in a way, this seemed like slap in the face to many Flyers fans who are also big fans of Bobby Ryan.

We root for the players that play for our team, and sometimes we root for players that have never played for our team. But what the Olympics really shows us is that we really and truly do root for the name on the front of the jersey more than we root for the name on the back. It’s one of the biggest cliches in sports- but it is also one of the truest concepts. As players or as fans, our allegiances will always lie with our cities, or our countries long before they lie with the players. Because as much as we love our players, and as much as we look to them for the great sports moments, the players come and go, but a team is forever.

After the Olympics are over, Claude Giroux is going to be our star in Philadelphia. It doesn’t matter that he isn’t playing in the Olympics, just like it won’t matter if he ends up on the roster because of an injury replacement. We wouldn’t be rooting for him anyway. it doesn’t matter that Bobby Ryan isn’t playing for the United States, because we are still going to root for our country. All politics aside, the Olympics are what they are- a chance to cheer for your country. Hockey fans all over the country will put their differences aside and cheer for Jonathan Quick, Ryan Miller, Zach Parise, Patrick Kane and the rest of team USA. And when the Olympics are over we will go back to rooting for our NHL teams and the players that we love. We’ll go back to borderline-disliking many of the players that we cheered for just weeks earlier, and we’ll get into arguments over why our team is better. It’s one of the great things about sports. People can put their differences aside and unite over a common goal, and then people can go back to what they know. It’s what makes sports exciting, and it is exactly what is going to make these Olympics great.