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There are a lot of compelling reasons why Steve Yzerman was chosen as executive director of Canada's 2010 men's Olympic hockey team, but maybe the most important of all is that he was actually on the ice, in 2002, when Canada won the gold medal and ended a 50-year drought.
The view from ice level will be critical because the Salt Lake City experience in 2002 will most closely resemble the atmosphere, the pressure and the circumstances that Canada's entry can expect from the hometown Vancouver Olympics.
Face it: Managers manage and coaches coach, but at the end of the day, the players on the ice ultimately determine who wins and loses. And after Canada fell so hard in Turin in the last Olympics, the appetite for change is great.
When selecting the 2006 Olympic team, the Canadian management team did not want to change much from the team that won the World Cup in 2004. As a result, several of the brightest young talents in the game — including Sidney Crosby — were not included on the final roster.
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The team opted for a couple of role players in Kris Draper and Kirk Maltby, who had demonstrated a long-standing loyalty to Hockey Canada, plus a fading star with much personal baggage in Todd Bertuzzi.
Canada was flat throughout the tournament. Player selection may have contributed to its struggles, but the absence of a strong leadership group (which Steve Yzerman and Mario Lemieux provided in 2002) was probably a greater factor in their collective failure. That will be Yzerman's primary challenge — to weigh the value of experience against the need to select the most productive players 14 months from now.
That's when the 23-player lineup needs to be set.
There will almost certainly be major changes on defence, where a new generation of players — Brian Campbell, Shea Weber, Mike Green, Brent Burns and Dion Phaneuf — will feature in the selection process, ahead of the fading thirtysomethings that were part of the mix in Turin.
Yzerman understands how to make hard decisions and even what it is like to be on the receiving end of them — there were times, early in his career, when he didn't make the cut on the Canada Cup teams populated by Lemieux, Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky will be a member of Yzerman's advisory group, which is also expected to include a number of the NHL's most experienced general managers, men such as Ken Holland, his boss in Detroit, as well as the Montreal Canadiens' Bob Gainey and the Edmonton Oilers' Kevin Lowe.
The coaching staff will not be named until the end of the NHL season, but barring a complete reversal of fortune, the leading candidate will be Red Wings' head coach Mike Babcock, who was behind the bench for last year's Stanley Cup victory and previously won world championships with both Canada's senior and junior men's teams.
As it stands, the Red Wings team, with its heavy concentration of European stars, offers no legitimate candidates for the Canadian playing roster.
Yzerman moved to the front of the managerial line after Gretzky officially bowed out of consideration for the job last month and was general manager of Canada's past two world championship teams, which won gold and silver medals in back-to-back years.
The fact that Yzerman has no NHL GM experience matters little in this undertaking.
The title is, after all, executive director — and the job description is different from that of an NHL GM. There are no trades to be made; no players to sign. Every player in the league with the correct citizenship is at his disposal. And unlike the challenge of recruiting players for the worlds, where veteran players often bow out for personal reasons, there is little chance that anyone will say no to the Olympic team.
The fact that Yzerman doesn't run an NHL team of his own is actually an advantage — it gives him more time to broadly assess the available player pool and determine which of them possesses the qualities needed to perform, in the spotlight, under the most intense pressure that most of them will ever face.
Groomed in a Detroit organization that emphasizes skill and talent, Yzerman will likely lean toward Canada's 2002 team model, which took NHL stars and asked them to play roles on the team — as opposed to the 1998 and 2006 entries, which left some of the brightest lights on the sidelines, in favour of two-way players who were loyal members of past teams.
Loyalty matters a great deal to Yzerman — it is another quality abundantly on display in the Detroit organization — but performance matters even more. And for an undertaking in which every move will be scrutinized under the microscope from this day forward, emphasizing performance is not a bad place to start.
