from Sean McIndoe at The Guardian,

To get you started, here are a half-dozen reasons to be irrationally annoyed with the World Cup.

The whole thing is messing up NHL training camps
Unlike the Olympics, which take place in February and force the entire NHL regular season to grind to a halt for a few weeks, the World Cup happens in September. On the surface, that seems like a good thing. But give it a few weeks, and you’ll find that somebody somewhere is complaining about how the tournament disrupted training camps and ruined some team’s season before it even began.

Just wait. By the end of October, any team that’s off to a disappointing start will be grumbling about it all being the World Cup’s fault. They couldn’t build up team chemistry or hammer out their game plan properly because key players were off playing in the tournament instead of working with their NHL teammates. This will be especially true if the team had lots of players participating. And if the head coach was also off working with a World Cup team, even better. NHL teams love nothing more than ready-made excuses.

And then there’s the near certainty that at some point during the World Cup, somebody will get hurt, with history telling us there’s a good chance it’s a superstar who goes down....

more plus more reasons...