mine: >> preparation. I think that restricting the NCAA to American-born >> players, while allowing the CIAU team to use non-seniors and players >> with professional experience (which the NCAA team *can't* use) makes >> the game not really comparison of NCAA vs CIAU, but it does provide >> for a competative US-Canada game, which is what sells tickets. Arthur Berman's: >What is "professional" is a matter of definition. The NC$$ does not allow >players who appear (more than briefly) with tier one juniors to be >eligible. The announcers said that there were also CIAU players with ECHL and I think AHL experience. > This is *not* a rule in the CIAU. To imply that one set of >rules gets to define professional is out of bounds. Any association can >set up what rules it wants. Well yeah, and I wouldn't have complained if it were the CIAU all-stars vs. the NCAA all-stars, but the NCAA team was subject not only to their own restrictions, but also to choose only American players, which was a bigger limitation on them than requiring the CIAU players to be Canadians. Since they were putting an additional restriction in place than affected the USA more than Canada, why not add others that made the rules the same for both sides? (Rhetorically speaking, of course; I'd rather see both sides use players regardless of nationality.) >At any >rate, the exhibition suggested later in the post between the CIAU and NC$$ >champs would virtually certainly include some former juniors on the CIAU >team. Yes, but it would include *all* players on both teams, not just American seniors on the NCAA side and Canadians on the CIAU side. I guess that what struck me about this game was that it was less a game between NCAA and CIAU representatives than another US-Canada game in the same series that includes World Cup and World Junior matchups, but with a different set of restrictions on the pools of players. (I mean heck, they even wore the same uniforms.) >It should also be clearly pointed out that it was the NC$$ which >restricted the participation on the American team to seniors. Presumably for the same reason that college all-star games in any sport are limited to seniors. But the restriction stands out more in hockey, where underclassmen can go off and play for Olympic or World Junior teams. But because this Team USA was composed only of NCAA players, I guess it counted as an all-star game. Anyway, just my opinion. Clearly the organizers disagree. And it was a good game, played with real intensity, not like those namby-pamby NHL All-Star Games where the only penalty called is too many men. John Whelan, Cornell '91 <[log in to unmask]> <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/jshock.html> Cornell Men's Ice Hockey: Back-to-back ECAC and Ivy League Champions HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.