When it comes to hockey, Team USA learns that heart can be fickle

ByCHRIS JONES
September 25, 2016, 4:50 PM

— -- TORONTO -- Ralph Krueger, the head coach of plucky, piecemeal Team Europe, shines like a light. His coaching tenure with the Edmonton Oilers ended early and badly; now he's the chairman of Southampton, the Premier League football club. Not many men can switch sports at the highest levels. Krueger managed it because when he enters a room, his heart is as open as the door he walked through.

On Thursday at the World Cup of Hockey, he was asked about how much the human heart tells in our games, hockey most of all.

"I don't think there's a game more honest than ice hockey," he said. "There's no hiding here. ... If you're not connected, it doesn't matter how much skill you have, you're going to be dealing with luck and chance. Hockey will punish you if you're dependent on that. It's such a great game because of that. Such an honest game."

Heart is an amorphous concept, easy to lie about. It's nice to think that desire can overcome any weakness, because most of us have weaknesses and the alternative is believing that you'll never be good enough. And underdogs win sometimes, which means heart must win sometimes, too.

Heart is also an impossible thing to metric, and there are times when having all the heart in the world doesn't help. In some ways, big hearts can seem the easiest to wound. They're bigger targets.

Dean Lombardi, the general manager of Team USA and the Los Angeles Kings, has a huge heart. He is known for his almost blind devotion to his players. If he falls in love with you, he will love you forever. He is the sort of man who makes other men wish they saw the world as clearly as he does.

Like Krueger, he, too, talked about passion and hockey on Thursday. Unlike Krueger and Team Europe, Lombardi and his team were going home soon after.

Lombardi talked specifically about how he believes heart can close "the talent gap" between teams.

"I think that our game allows emotion, competitiveness, caring about each other, to close that gap more than any other sport," he said. "And that's why I think it's the greatest game. There's no doubt in my mind that the formula has worked. We've won two Stanley Cups. The first thing, yes, we had talent, no question about it. But the reason we won, we were a frickin' team."

When Lombardi was building Team USA, he began with the premise that no matter what roster he made, it would be less talented than Canada's.

His coach, John Tortorella, agreed.

"I'll be honest: We're not as deep as Canada skill-wise," he said. "Not sure USA Hockey will like me saying that, but it's the truth. It's a situation where I still think, in our mind, we could not just skill our way through Canada."

So Lombardi decided that his team needed to compensate with heart. He used his hands to show the talent gap between Team USA and Canada. He said he could have picked a different roster that would have narrowed that gap, and he drew his hands closer together. Instead, he purposefully picked a roster that widened that gap, he said. He pulled his hands farther apart.

Their heart, he said, would more than make up the greater distance. In his mind, then, talent has a ceiling, but heart doesn't. Heart must be exponential.

He lifted the hand that represented Team USA over the Canadian one.

"Give me 22 guys that care," Lombardi said. "That's where it starts. From there you can build competitiveness and culture and everything else. But if you don't have 22 guys that care, you're not going to get to square two."

Then Team USA came here (with 23 guys) and lost 3-0 to Krueger's Team Europe, lightly regarded almost to the point of invisibility. The Americans didn't just lose that game. They were flat, uninspired, gutless. Never mind too-talented Canada, which also beat them. They couldn't beat a group cobbled together from eight different countries deemed too uncompetitive to dress their own teams.

What did that that say about Team USA's heart?

Krueger also used his hands to answer that question. "In the end, what we did with the U.S. in the first game -- maybe it was like this, the skill levels," he said, and he held the hand representing his team well below his American hand. "But the work ethic and the passion and the team spirit was able to bring us above them on that day."

Now his other hand, like his team, was on top.

Lombardi didn't much like the suggestion that his group had been outgutted by an afterthought team that is also this tournament's oldest.

"No. There were guys in tears in that room the other night, and they were real," he said of the moments after the loss to Canada that eliminated them. "And some of the texts I got from players, I'll treasure for the rest of my life. That's good stuff. Those are things you don't forget, even in failure. And so that part we got down."

Even if heart can't be quantified, Lombardi's math doesn't add up. He thought heart would help his players close the gap between them and the better team, which is advancing to Saturday's semifinal. Instead they were caught by a worse one, which will play in Sunday's.

The harshest possible assessment of Team USA is that it had no heart.

The kindest one is that it was made to be broken.