Summit Series - Legacy

Legacy

While Canada won the series, both teams could claim victory. The Soviets earned the respect of fans and players alike; the Canadians went from scoffing at their antiquated equipment and strange training methods and practices, to admiration for their talent and conditioning. Frank Mahovlich said "give the Russians a football and they'd win the Super Bowl in two years."

Many Soviet citizens believed that the outcome may have been different if Anatoli Firsov and Vitaly Davydov had not sat out the series to protest a coaching change. In response, some offer that Canada was without Bobby Orr due to his knee injury as well as Bobby Hull (due to his departure from the NHL to the newly formed WHA). These were arguably the best Canadian players at the time (besides Phil Esposito), so neither team had all of its greatest talent on the ice. The Soviet team also had the obvious advantage of playing year-round. Meanwhile, the Canadian team was picked and prepared in only a few months and most players were out-of-shape. At the time, NHL players did not regularly train during the summer months, using the period for a holiday or other activities.

In the end, the Summit Series conclusively proved that the gap between the best Canadian NHL players and the top national teams of Europe (USSR, Czechoslovakia, Sweden) was much narrower than most observers on both sides of the Atlantic had anticipated. The Swedish national team coach Billy Harris (a former NHL pro with the Toronto Maple Leafs) later recalled that "the (Swedish) media would ask me, 'do you see even one Swedish player who could possibly have a chance in the National Hockey League?' I answered, 'No, I see 14 of them!'" The success of the 1972 Summit Series would lead to the development of the Canada Cup ice hockey world championship tournament open to both pros and amateurs. It also led to regular series "Soviet clubs vs the NHL", known as the Super Series, that also were held on numerous occasions after 1976, as was the Canada Cup. By this time an increasing number of top NHL players had formerly starred for the Swedish or Czechoslovak national team. The top Soviet players were finally allowed to sign contracts with NHL clubs in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the USSR crumbled.

In North America, the Series (particularly the first few games) exposed the need for better preparation and offseason training. Philadelphia Flyers coach Fred Shero became an avid student of the Soviet style and was one of the first to bring the Russian training techniques to the NHL as the Flyers won two Stanley Cup championships in 1974 and 1975. Tom Mellor (who joined the small but rapidly growing group of American-born NHL players after the 1972 Olympics) lamented that the NHL training methods of the early 1970s were vastly inferior to those of the Soviets. "When I went to play for Detroit after the Olympics, Alex Delvecchio was the coach. (...) When he would coach, we would do a couple of one-on-ones, two-on-twos, three-on-twos, we'd scrimmage, and he would scrimmage with us. At the end of the scrimmage, we'd do a couple of figure eights and then go to the bar. That was the NHL and pro mentality." Mark Howe commented that the Soviet national team must have trained six hours on the day of a game in the 1972 Winter Olympics. On the other hand, Swedish sports journalists were extremely impressed by the toughness and "never say die" fighting spirit of the Canadians, who lost only one game out of seven on European ice despite usually trailing in the third period. According to Soviet player Boris Mikhailov, who later became a coach, "it was a meeting between two schools of hockey and we have since continued this great exchange and we have learned from each other, taking the best of both styles."

As time passed, the significance of the series grew in the public consciousness, and the term "Summit Series" became its unofficial accepted name. In Canada, the Summit Series is a source of national pride, and is seen by many as a landmark event in Canadian cultural history. In Canada, Paul Henderson's goal is considered the most famous in the history of the game. The series is also seen by many Canadians as an important win in the Cold War.