The Russian Olympic hockey team, which this week meekly bowed out in the quarterfinal round at its own homeland's Winter Games in Sochi, is a shadow of what it was in the 1980s, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen says.
"They were just a dominant force in international hockey," Thiessen told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"If you think about it, the Soviets were this otherworldly team."
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But that was then, he notes.
"We rarely saw someone that came in and played for some of the NHL teams. Today, the star of the Russian team is Alex Ovechkin, who plays for the Washington Capitals," Thiessen said.
"Washington, D.C. is cheering for him the rest of the year when Moscow isn't. So it's just a completely different dynamic than then."
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