League of Nations

A Czech, a Finn and a Ukrainian walk into a room . . .

No joke. No punch line. This is real life in the NHL these days. Fact is, it happens every day, all around the league. In this case, the setting was the Mighty Ducks’ training facility in Anaheim.

Hockey, the world’s game? You bet.

In many ways the European invasion is the best thing to have happened to the NHL since the invention of ice. Diversity has strengthened, not weakened, the league.

“The game is better now than it’s ever been,” said Duck Coach Craig Hartsburg, who played for 10 seasons with the Minnesota North Stars in the 1980s.

In 1967-68, the season the NHL doubled in size to 12 teams, the league said only 1.3% of its players had been born outside North America. Last season, 23.9%, the highest percentage in the league’s history, had been born outside North America.

The Ducks had eight nations--Belarus, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine and the United States--represented at training camp. The Kings had six--Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Slovakia and the U.S.

“We are the United Nations,” Duck goaltender Guy Hebert said, breaking into a proud smile as Pavel Trnka, the Czech; Teemu Selanne, the Finn, and Oleg Tverdovsky, the Ukrainian, discussed lunch plans in English.

Meanwhile, at the Kings’ practice facility in North Hills . . .

“Ako sa mas?” Ziggy Palffy asked.

“Ako sa mas?” repeated Luc Robitaille, a French-Canadian learning to say, “How are you?” in the native tongue of Palffy and Jozef Stumpel, his Slovakian linemates.

Such dressing-room scenes would have been impossible only a few years ago. European players were often viewed by North Americans as lazy cheap-shot artists who didn’t know about NHL history and couldn’t care less about winning the Stanley Cup.

Times have changed.

The Berlin Wall fell. NHL players participated in the 1998 Olympics. The format of the All-Star game was changed from Eastern Conference versus Western to North America versus the rest of the world. Russian members of the champion Detroit Red Wings took the Stanley Cup for a little tour of Moscow. A new breed of European players such as Selanne and Palffy showed remarkable grace, on and off the ice.

Most general managers figured it was time to devote more attention to scouting and drafting players like Selanne and Palffy. Suddenly, no one seemed to care that a team’s roster had almost as many Czechs, Finns, Russians and Swedes as Canadians.

Don’t speak the language?

Score a goal.

Throw a check.

“Five or 10 years ago, it was a huge problem,” Hartsburg said when asked about the difficulties of coaching players from so many nations. “Now, it’s not. It doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody is on equal terms. In the 1980s, I played in exhibitions against the Russians and they were, like, the enemy.

“Those barriers are all down now. It’s more about personality. You build your team on personality and chemistry.”

Welcome to the Magic Kingdom

Some teams--the Florida Panthers, for instance--have English-only policies in their dressing rooms as a way of bringing the players closer together.

The Ducks do not. Walk into their dressing room and you may hear conversations in French, Czech, Finnish, Russian and Swedish, as well as English.

In their inaugural season of 1993-94, the Ducks provided English tutors for their Russian-speaking players, hoping it would help them in renting apartments and buying new cars and clothes.

Now, Russians Maxim Balmochnykh, 20, and Vitaly Vishnevski, 19, must learn from teammates. Tverdovsky and defenseman Ruslan Salei, who hails from Belarus but speaks Russian, are there to help. Previously, Balmochnykh and Vishnevski might have sat in a corner by themselves.

But no longer. What good would it do?

“I don’t know how important team chemistry is in baseball,” left wing Jim McKenzie said. In hockey, it’s everything, he added.

“My daughter will have a birthday party and I’ll invite all the guys on the team,” McKenzie said. “Or we’ll say, ‘Let’s go get a steak.’ And at 6:30, we’ll all meet in the hotel lobby. Last year, we called a team meeting to go see a movie. It was a stupid movie, but we were all talking about it in the dressing room the next day.”

Said Hebert, “Guys here tend to embrace a new guy when he comes into the dressing room. It’s not easy, walking into a new locker room, and if you don’t speak the language. . . . But it doesn’t help the team when new guys come in and don’t feel a part of it.”

Trnka came to North America from the Czech Republic without knowing a word of English, but he picked it up by watching TV while playing in the minor leagues.

Tverdovsky faced the added burden of high expectations in his first season in the NHL. After all, he was a first-round draft pick coming to a new team.

Salei spent his first season playing for Las Vegas in the International Hockey League. He relied on friends to help him do everything from buying groceries to getting his cable TV installed.

Trnka, Tverdovsky and Salei are the fortunate ones, members of the great wave of European players in the last five years. Defenseman Fredrik Olausson arrived from Sweden for his first season in 1986-87.

In many ways, the old stereotypes fit him. He didn’t understand the importance of the Stanley Cup. He knew nothing of “Hockey Night in Canada.” He wasn’t lazy, but he needed to prove it.

“A lot of people were very good to me when I first came over to Winnipeg,” Olausson said. “My first roommate, Paul MacLean, talked to me a lot and told me what the NHL is all about. A lot of it [acceptance] is what you show on the ice and earning the respect of your teammates. If you [work hard], I don’t care where you come from.

“If you get over the language barrier right from the start, that always helps.”

L.A., Crossroads of the Globe

By acquiring Palffy from the New York Islanders over the summer, the Kings reunited him with Stumpel, his boyhood teammate, and created a top line that is two-thirds Slovakian and one-third French-Canadian.

“We’ll teach him one [phrase] a day,” Stumpel said, laughing as Robitaille repeated, “Ako sa mas?”

“Tomorrow, we’ll teach him ‘good.’ ‘

At a Tampa restaurant last season, 18 Kings from seven countries dined together and no one had trouble with the words “steak and baked potato.”

When Duck enforcer Stu Grimson went after Palffy in an exhibition game last week, Rob Blake, a Canadian, went after Grimson, a countryman.

It was not always that way in the NHL.

In 1991, Palffy left the Islanders and went home to play when some Islanders refused to pass him the puck in training camp. He returned two seasons later, learned English while playing at Salt Lake City of the IHL and became a 40-plus goal scorer in the NHL.

“A long time ago, people began to understand that if they can help you win, who cares where they’re from?” Robitaille said. “It’s different from 10-15 years ago, when there weren’t as many foreign players here. Now, there are so many, you just play.”

Vaclav Nedomansky is one of the reasons there are so many Europeans on the Kings’ roster. Nedomansky played six seasons in the NHL, with Detroit, the Rangers and St. Louis, before retiring in 1983.

Now, he is the Kings’ European scout, based in the Czech Republic.

“Before, [North Americans] thought we were here to take their jobs and their women,” he said, laughing. “They would ‘run’ us and say, ‘Fighting is part of the game.’ ”

The old stereotype was that the European game was finesse-oriented, and that Europeans could be intimidated by rough play. The Red Wings destroyed the myth by winning Stanley Cups in 1997 and ’98 with physical play and Russian leadership. Coach Scotty Bowman even adopted the old Soviet practice of playing a five-man unit, and in that case all five were Russians.

Increasingly, teams are looking to Europe for talent, and the Kings are no exception. In June, the Kings made Frantisek Kaberle, a defenseman from the Czech Republic who will probably play in the NHL this season, their top pick in the draft. Finns Aki Berg, in 1995, and Olli Jokinen, in 1997, are also first-round selections.

“We look at their playing ability and talk with coaches,” Nedomansky said of scouting in Europe. “But we also want to see their work ethic and their parents and education. . . . And we are looking for players who are close to being ready to play in the NHL.”

If Nedomansky finds the prospect is comfortable with English, it’s a plus.

Berg wasn’t fluent during his first three seasons with the Kings, and in negotiations on a contract renewal last season, his perceived inability to become part of the team was used against him by the team.

He’s back with the Kings after a season in Finland, and teammates say he is much more outgoing.

“I have learned more English,” Berg said. “My agent told me it would help me.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

NHL Players by Birthplace

(as of Oct. 17, 1998; 653 players)

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Canada 399 U.S. 98 Russia 42 Czech Republic 37 Sweden 34 Finland 15 Slovakia 6 Latvia 4 Ukraine 4 England 3 Germany 2 Lithuania 2 Poland 2 Belarus 1 Nigeria 1 Northern Ireland 1 Scotland 1 South Africa 1

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NHL Demographics

NHL player demographics since 1967-68 (Percentage of where players were born):

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Season Canadian Others U.S. 1967-68 96.7 1.3 2.0 1968-69 95.9 2.3 1.8 1969-70 94.7 3.2 2.1 1970-71 95.3 2.6 2.1 1971-72 94.4 1.8 3.8 1972-73 93.5 1.9 4.6 1973-74 92.2 2.9 4.9 1974-75 92.0 2.3 5.7 1975-76 92.1 1.9 6.0 1976-77 90.9 2.4 6.7 1977-78 89.5 3.7 6.8 1978-79 86.5 5.0 8.5 1979-80 82.1 6.3 11.6 1980-81 82.1 6.7 11.2 1981-82 81.8 8.2 10.0 1982-83 82.5 8.5 9.0 1983-84 78.3 8.7 13.0 1984-85 77.6 9.2 13.2 1985-86 75.7 9.5 14.8 1986-87 76.5 8.6 14.9 1987-88 77.5 7.7 14.8 1988-89 75.7 9.6 14.7 1989-90 72.0 12.0 16.0 1990-91 72.7 11.2 16.1 1991-92 71.2 11.9 16.9 1992-93 66.2 17.2 16.6 1993-94 64.2 18.7 17.1 1994-95 62.3 19.8 17.9 1995-96 61.5 20.8 17.7 1996-97 60.8 22.3 16.9 1997-98 61.4 22.5 16.1 1998-99 61.1 23.9 15.0

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Note: Data from 1989-90 through 1997-98 was taken from early-season rosters. Previous years’ data based on actual number of players that played in that season.