OLYMPIC NOTES : USA Hockey Team Not Looking Strong

For a few brief moments, the United States appeared to have an opportunity to make real progress in international hockey competition. Then the World Championships came around earlier this month in Munich.

The U.S. finished in sixth place.

Again.

That seems to be something of a comfort level for USA Hockey, which hasn’t been able to make much noise internationally since the Miracle on Ice team won the gold medal at the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid. The U.S. placed seventh in Sarajevo in 1984, seventh in Calgary in ’88 and fourth in Albertville in ‘92, and hasn’t fared any better at the World Championships.

But when USA Hockey came close to an agreement with the National Hockey League late last year that would have allowed the game’s top professionals to play in the Olympics, there was hope. And when the NHL began signing away some of the top stars from European and former Soviet bloc countries, the balance of international power appeared to be shifting.

“But if you look at the World Championships, that’s not the case,” says Baaron Pittenger, USA Hockey’s outgoing executive director. “We were there -- admittedly, with less preparation -- with some pretty good hockey players, and we finished sixth. And, frankly, I’m very concerned about the quality of our player pool for the ’94 Games.”

If it’s any consolation, the ’94 Olympics likely will be the last time the U.S. will send a team of collegians and minor-leaguers to the Winter Games. By 1998 in Nagano, Japan, the NHL will be on board with some form of “Dream Team” approach the NBA used to dominate the Summer Games’ basketball competition in Barcelona.

Negotiations to make it happen in Lillehammer, Norway, broke down when USA Hockey couldn’t persuade a majority of NHL owners to take a three-week hiatus in the middle of the regular season. With more time to work out a solution between now and ‘98, some accommodation will be reached.

If anything, the NHL will weaken the U.S. team next February. Because the league is expanding by two teams in ‘93-94, the pros will take an extra 50 or so players (not including minor-leaguers) away from Olympic national teams. And because the NHL will play an 84-game schedule next season, up from 82, it will be more difficult for USA Hockey to schedule its series of pre-Olympic exhibitions against the pros. In ‘92, the U.S. team played each American NHL franchise at least once as part of its preparation for Albertville; next winter, there will be only six or eight of those exhibitions.

As usual, the U.S. team will be strong at the top but perilously thin at the bottom of its roster. If national Coach Tim Taylor can keep the likes of Minnesota-Duluth forward Derek Plante, Minnesota defenseman Travis Richards, Harvard forward Ted Drury (a ’92 Olympian) and Maine goalie Mike Dunham together through Lillehammer, the U.S. has a chance. But only a chance. USA Hockey’s entry in Munich featured nine collegians and 14 NHL players whose teams weren’t in the postseason and still could do no better than sixth.

“We’ve got plenty of hockey coaches and administrators who know the game,” says Walter Bush Jr., USA Hockey’s president. “We want to start putting them to work to try to improve the game from a skills standpoint. I just don’t understand why American and Canadian players don’t seem to have the skill development that they do in Europe. . . . The talent pool is always a concern. But our not getting the NHL on board for ’94 meant the Canadians didn’t, either. And neither did the Russians or the Czechs.”

Sixth place at the World Championships isn’t all bad. It puts the U.S. in an Olympic draw with Sweden, Canada, Italy and France rather than Russia, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Austria and Norway.

Expect Russia, which won in Munich, to be the favorite in Lillehammer. USA Hockey has scheduled a Russian national team, featuring nine or 10 of that country’s Olympians, for a series of exhibitions in the U.S. in early December -- including a nationally televised game on CBS December 4 -- which ought to give American Olympic hockey fans a firsthand look at the U.S. comfort level.

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USA Hockey is in the midst of an administrative shakeup, but it doesn’t signal a change in direction. Pittenger is leaving to pursue a sports-related business opportunity in Massachusetts. Mike Schroeder, the federation’s director of fund-raising and public relations, accepted a post with a professional in-line roller hockey league expected to begin play in July.

“Everything is in place,” Bush says. “Whoever comes in to replace Baaron will have a pretty good road map, so to speak, to follow. I think the new person will certainly have to have administrative and marketing skills. And with Mike, I think we were going to change the focus of the marketing department, anyway, whether he stayed or left. It’s not that what we were doing was wrong, but we want to get more involved with our sponsors. We’ve got the sponsors. Now, let’s find something for them to do.”

During Pittenger’s three years as executive director, USA Hockey laid out a long-range plan with strategic objectives designed to bring the level of play in this country up to international standards by the turn of the century. He won’t be in place to see it happen, but he helped lay the groundwork that eventually will open international competition to the game’s top professionals.

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The International Olympic Committee has scheduled negotiations on a television contract for the 1996 Summer Games for the week of July 26 in New York. Whatever deal is struck likely will break ground in the way the Olympics are broadcast, but there is no chance the contract will be similar to Major League Baseball’s revolutionary proposal with NBC and ABC.

“That certainly would not be my first, second or even third choice as a way of dealing with it,” says Richard Pound, an IOC executive board member from Canada who handles television negotiations. “But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the networks come up with something creative. Even without having heard the proposal that ABC, Turner and ESPN are going to come up with, my guess is that it will contain some novel elements. Aside from the fact that they all copy each other, it is a very creative business. I would expect them to respond to the difficult conditions they find themselves in with something unusual and interesting.”

The networks love the proposed baseball deal because no rights fees are involved, which means the only expense to NBC and ABC would be the production and start-up costs they would share with Major League Baseball. But the IOC will insist on rights fees rather than the speculative profit baseball is considering gambling on.

“The certainty that the revenue will come in is important to us,” says A.D. Frazier, chief operating officer for the Atlanta organizing committee. “It is more important than the possibility of a significantly greater payoff.”

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It’s come to this: Whichever World University Games team wins the basketball competition in Buffalo July 8 through 19 will be the champion of The Laettner Family Men’s Basketball Finals. The organizing committee has made Buffalo native Christian Laettner an official special ambassador and named the finals for his family because the Timberwolves rookie was one of the few early local supporters of the event.

In January, when times were particularly tough for local organizers, Laettner donated $50,000 and challenged Buffalo’s two major professional sports franchises -- the Bills and Sabres -- to ante up. So far, the Bills and the Sabres haven’t answered the call.

Although ticket sales are lagging and some $3.5 million has yet to be raised, organizers insist that financing for the World University Games passed the critical stage when New York Telephone signed on with a corporate gift earlier this year. Still, the western New York area hasn’t exactly embraced the undertaking.

“I think our grassroots support has been tremendous,” says games Chairman Burt Flickinger. “And some business support has been excellent. But some has not been all that we would like it to be, so it’s kind of a mixed bag.”