Nov 17
NHL top scorer not in Vancouver
The Olympic hockey tournament took on even greater meaning and life starting in 1998 when the NHL decided to participate, closing down the league for two and a half weeks to allow most of its players to travel to Nagano for the tournament. If, however, someone in 1998 had ever suggested that the NHL’s top scorer would be ineligible to play in the Olympics, he would have been branded an idiot. Yet, here we are in 2009, and that is exactly the situation we are in. Anze Kopitar leads the league with 32 points in 21 games, but he won’t be going to Vancouver – his native country, Slovenia, didn’t qualify for 2010. Kopitar’s rise to the top of the heap in the NHL, half a world away from Slovenia and seemingly a million miles from Jesenice, his place of birth and a city so far removed from world-class hockey as to be laughable, is something of a hockey miracle. The current IIHF Survey of Players lists Slovenia as having a total of 1,434 hockey players, junior and senior, men and women.
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NHL top scorer not in Vancouver
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2010 2010 Games 2010 Olympics 2010 Winter Olympics games Olympics vancouver Vancouver 2010 whistler Whistler 2010
