North Americans Bure-d by World Team, 9-4

There will be no parades in Prague, no mobs in Moscow, no hoopla in Helsinki to celebrate the World All-Star team’s 9-4 rout of North America on Sunday at the Air Canada Centre in the 50th NHL All-Star game.

This victory was not a watershed event for Europeans, even though they constitute about 23% of the players on NHL rosters, ahead of the 17% born in the U.S. but well behind the 60% born in Canada.

“Oh, it was the best game of my life, the best game I ever played,” Jaromir Jagr of the Pittsburgh Penguins said with mock solemnity. “Better than the Stanley Cup.”

OK, point made. The course of NHL history wasn’t altered.

“I don’t think it really means a lot,” said Mighty Duck and World team winger Teemu Selanne. “It’s a nice feeling, especially for me. This was my seventh All-Star game and it’s the first time I won.”

Yet, the Europeans’ victory Sunday was significant. In a league desperate to fill the enormous void left when Wayne Gretzky retired last year, they were a beacon of hope, a rich vein of creativity the NHL must continue to mine.

Of the top 25 scorers at the all-star break, nine were European-trained. Jagr, a Czech, is the scoring leader with 80 points; Russian-born Pavel Bure, who had a hat trick and an assist Sunday, is the goal-scoring leader with 37 and is one of seven Europeans in the top 15 goalscorers. Of the top 10 scorers among defensemen, five are European-trained, including top scorer Sandis Ozolinsh of Latvia and the Colorado Avalanche.

Four Europeans are among the top eight in power-play goals and there are six Europeans among the top 13 in game-winning goals. Three of the top six plus/minus ratings are owned by Europeans.

“A great indication of what they can do was in the third period,” said North American defenseman Al MacInnis, who has seen the NHL’s European population explode during his 16 seasons. “We were down by one [5-4] and we gambled offensively, which gave them a lot of odd-man situations. When those guys get a chance to put the puck in the net, they don’t miss often.

“It’s great for the league. We’re represented by a lot of countries, and hopefully the league can take advantage of it.”

Not long ago, European players were being taken advantage of. Swedes were derided as chicken, Russians were deemed inscrutable, and Europeans generally were derided as too soft to play the rugged North American style.

Supposedly Europeans also passed too much, waited too long to make a perfect play, wouldn’t go in the corners and couldn’t take the rigors of a long NHL season. Nor could they function well on NHL rinks, which are narrower than those in Europe and are incubators of physical play.

Those myths have been dispelled, although they will never be completely erased. If two prospects are alike, and one is European and the other from the Canadian prairie, most NHL general managers will still choose their own.

“We’re still far away [from being equal],” said Finnish defenseman Teppo Numminen of the Phoenix Coyotes. “When you’re a small group of players, that group has to be better than the group from North America in a draft. The style of hockey makes a big difference. It’s tougher to know, ‘Is he going to be a player who can play in a small rink?’

“We’re not from here, so there’s always the language thing with the media. It’s never going to be the same, but I think the respect is there. It’s just a different situation for the players.”

They spoke different tongues Sunday, yet easily found common ground. “They were out there to play the game. I think they were having fun. They were pretty loose,” said Joel Quenneville of the St. Louis Blues, assistant coach of the World team. “A lot of them were speaking different languages, but they were getting along real well. . . . You saw some skill and saw some nice plays and some nice finishes today.”

They needed no dictionaries to understand each other. There may be thousands of ways to say, “two-on-one,” but only a few ways to finish one. And when Slovakian-born Pavol Demitra scored on assists from Russian Dimitri Yushkevich and Czech Peter Elias, he didn’t need a translator to tell him to pounce on a rebound.

“I don’t think you can say who is better after this game, but it was a lot of fun,” Demitra said. “It was an exhibition game for the people. Everybody wanted to show what they can do.”

Obviously, the Europeans can do a lot. Their enthusiasm alone was admirable in a game that sometimes seemed as if it were being played in a library, so hushed was the crowd of 19,300. The World team had 14 first-time all-stars, compared with two for team North America.

Said North America goalie Martin Brodeur, who was victimized twice by Bure in the second period: “This was just a game, for a show. When you play real games, it’s a different story.”

Said Jagr: “It doesn’t matter who wins as long as the fans are happy.”

But it does matter. It matters that talented players can flourish in the NHL. And if their accents are different from the natives’, it’s a difference worth celebrating.