Well, sort of.

 Granted, Canada plays Sweden tonight in the first game of the round robin, but everyone, from head coach Pat Quinn on down, is stressing that the first three games represent nothing more than a glorified training camp.

 Canada will certainly be playing to win. At no time do professional athletes of this calibre do any less.

 But it will be primarily a time for experimentation and observation, a time to evaluate line combinations, defence pairings and special teams, a time to get accustomed to the new rules and the larger ice surface.

 In practice yesterday, Quinn rolled over the defencemen so quickly that it was hard to tell who was supposed to be with whom.

 Afterwards, the announcement came that the two St. Louis players, Al MacInnis and Chris Pronger, were a designated pairing, but that came as news to MacInnis.

 He started to deny it, then laughed and said, "Well if that's what they say, I'm not going to argue."

 "I'm sure it's going to change a little bit in the next few days and over these three games," said Scott Niedermayer, who spent a lot of time with Eric Brewer as a partner. "They'll try to sort things out and the coaches are going to come up with what they feel makes our team the strongest."

 These early pairings don't really matter much other than as a discussion point to fill the pre-tournament doldrums. By the time the serious games start, it's highly likely that every defencemen will have played with every other at some point.

 After tonight's game, Quinn said, the coaches will compare their evaluations of the defence pairings "and we'll talk to the guys to find the way they felt."

 There was something of a surprise in the top power-play unit ÷ Owen Nolan, Mario Lemieux and Paul Kariya up front with Joe Sakic and Rob Blake on the points ÷ but again, it is not carved in stone.

 In fact, Quinn pointed out that it was not even an alignment of his choice. One of the assistant coaches thought that Nolan might work well up there, so they were giving it a try.

 And even Sakic admitted to being surprised to find that on a team with seven great defenceman, he was assigned to point duty.

 "I haven't been on the point in a couple of years," he said. "There are guys out there more experienced than me."

 But as Quinn said, "This was not the test today. This was just a familiarity sort of practice."

 It was a smart move by the coaching staff.

 The pressure of the Olympics is quite sufficient without adding to it by putting the players into a no-nonsense high-intensity practice on the opening day.

 Many of them played the night before and some didn't arrive until noon. The plight of MacInnis and Pronger was typical. They played in St. Louis on Tuesday and in Denver on Wednesday before flying to Salt Lake City yesterday.

 When the team bus was delayed getting to the rink, only 35 minutes remained in the Canadians' allotted practice time, but Quinn wasn't concerned. That was plenty for what he wanted to do.

 As it happened, he was granted more ice time, but the point is that he had no intention of putting the players through the grinder right away.

 He has stressed to them, as he has stressed to everyone, that the key is to be ready for the fourth game, not the first game. But after that, the wiggle room immediately evaporates.

 "We need to be flexible early on," Quinn said, "and we need to try all our guys because in this sort of thing, when you're in a one-game elimination, you've got to somehow find a way to have your guys going.

 "It might not be Owen's day and it might be someone else's, so you've got to have that flexibility."

 This is a major asset of Team Canada. All of these players are accustomed to logging plenty of ice time. If some players aren't going and the game is getting down to its crucial stages, Quinn can easily shorten his bench and go with the players who are on their game. The extended ice time won't be unusual.

 But he may not want to bench a whole line, or both partners in a defence pairing so in the next few days, he'll mix and match and give the players at least some degree of familiarity with all the others.

 Down the road, it may prove to have been a very wise decision indeed.

2002 Games Men's Hockey Coverage