from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

The Big Red Machine, as Russia’s national men’s hockey team came to be known, was always about more than just the game on the ice.

Back when they wore CCCP across their jerseys, more so than today, they played hockey unlike anyone else. The Soviets, with players like Valeri Kharlamov, Alexander Maltsev, Igor Larionov and the great KLM line, were like ballet on ice. A skating, shooting and (especially) passing propagandist tool of the former Soviet Union.

We called them professionals as they routinely defeated our amateurs, because that foul truth made us feel better about the results. And when our pros finally beat them in 1972, well, we still talk about it. When the Americans knocked them off at Lake Placid in 1980, it was indeed “A Miracle On Ice,” hockey’s version of walking on the moon.

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin has less control over those players than they did in the days of head coaches Anatoly Tarasov or Viktor Tikhonov. Under Putin, their national teams have largely been good, but no longer great.

Still, however, Putin considers the game to be an appendage of Mother Russia. Every bit as much as Leonid Brezhnev did.

So banning the Russians — and the Belarusians — from international hockey for the foreseeable future in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the International Ice Hockey Federation did on Monday, is like amputating a Russian sporting limb. It hits Putin where perhaps even economic sanctions can not reach — in the collective soul, where hockey resides in most Russians the way it does with us here in Canada.

“There are a lot of sports, but hockey probably hits Putin the hardest,” said IIHF Vice President Bob Nicholson. “He learned to play hockey himself so he could be around the hockey people.”

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