Ice hockey: Small selection for Olympics pits Storm’s headache:”Still enough seats available”

The Deutschland Cup shows: The selection that national coach Marco Sturm has for the Olympic Games is not large.

Marco Sturm didn’t want to say what his team will look like at the Olympics:”I haven’t even written it down yet,”said the national ice hockey coach.

Three months before the winter games in Pyeongchang, the composition of his team is a headache for the former NHL star, the only test of the Deutschland Cup that brought only one thing, apart from many disappointments, was the recognition: The selection is not large.

“Certain players have a big plus,”said Sturm, looking above all at the regular players of the past few years and their merits:”But there are plenty of places that are still available. At the home tournament in Augsburg, hardly anyone could recommend themselves for the trip to South Korea – although only about half a dozen strong forces were missing.

After a 2-8 debacle at the opening match against a B-selection of record world champion Russia, the national team showed an improvement in their 3-0 defeat of Slovakia, but the weaknesses, especially in the offensive, were alarming. A post shot by Marcel Müller (37th) was the only top-class goalscoring opportunity in 60 minutes.

“Insights are more important than results,”said the national coach. The most important one is not new for him, before Olympia (9. till 25. February 2018) but especially painful: Without their NHL pros, the selection of the German Ice Hockey Association (DEB) is without leadership. In Augsburg, no one jumped into the breach for Leon Draisaitl and Co., who are not allowed to play in Pyeongchang.

Sturm, who actually wanted to have his Olympic squad almost complete at the Deutschland Cup, is desperately looking for alternatives:”Some of them weren’t in shape yet,” he said, looking at the international players he hadn’t invited,”this can still happen, everything is still possible.

But apart from the long-time NHL pros Christian Ehrhoff and Marcel Goc, whom he allowed to take a break, the recently recovered top goal scorer Patrick Reimer, Felix Schütz from Cologne, who is missing for private reasons, and the injured defenders Frank Hördler and Denis Reul, only a few of them offer themselves. The only missing members of the home World Cup squad in Augsburg last May were Felix Brückmann and Gerrit Fauser from Wolfsburg and David Wolf from Mannheim, who had been injured since the beginning of October.

The prospect of the first Olympic Games seems to be more likely to cripple some of the DEB team than to inspire others:”No one is putting more pressure on themselves than others,”said captain Patrick Hager. But defender Moritz Müller admitted:”There’s a lot of talk about it, it’s in people’s minds to present themselves in the best possible way. 90 percent have never been to the Olympics.”