Components
The IIHF considers the three components of the club to be "the three most important championships available to the sport". The club has been described as a "a modern fraternity" because NHL players — considered professionals — were not allowed to play in the World Championships until 1977, and were not allowed to compete in the Olympics until 1998 (although pros were allowed starting in 1988), as both championships were originally intended for amateur players. Additionally, many top European players — particularly players from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia — were not allowed to play in the NHL and compete for the Stanley Cup before the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
Read more about this topic: Triple Gold Club
Famous quotes containing the word components:
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)