from Gabriel Luis Manga of The Guardian,
In next year’s NHL draft, the No1 pick won’t be the prototypical teen from Ontario, the Swedish speedster, or pummeling Muscovite. It will be an 18-year-old from Arizona who plays in Switzerland named Auston Matthews. The young phenom has ended up playing in Europe thanks to a combination of outsider hockey status – Phoenix is not exactly a hockeyhot-bed – and the logistics of being born just after the cutoff for last year’s draft.
Europe has long been a haven for North American hockey players. But most players who end up there are looking to continue the dream of making a living playing the sport they love, even if the NHL isn’t calling for them. That’s how Dan Olsen and Bruce Hardy, two Canadians, ended up in Iserlohn, just south of Dortmund in Germany. It was there that, in 1987, their hockey careers would lead them into what amounted to a dystopian version of Slap Shot. Their bankrupt team, ECD Iserlohn, turned to the most unlikely of saviors: Muammar Gaddafi.
European hockey is a strange place: jerseys are a neoliberal dream of sponsorship patches, and top scorers on each team are marked with gold helmets; there’s a lot of gimmick and schtick that goes into making the sport financially viable as it competes with soccer for attention. Heinz Weifenbach, the owner of ECD Iserlohn, was perfect for this world. A gregarious, mustachioed, cigar-smoking bon vivant who made his fortune in real estate development, Weifenbach had poured his wealth into making Iserlohn one of Germany’s top teams.
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