Poland Poland is a country of about 38 , 000 , 000 people in Europe . Its capital is Warsaw . The Poland national men ' s ice hockey team is the national ice hockey team of Poland , and a member of the International Ice Hockey Federation . They are ranked 21st in the world in the IIHF World Rankings , but prior to the 1980s they were ranked as high as 6th internationally . Financed by state coal money from the 1950s to the 1970 the Polish hockey team was a regular contender for medals in international tournaments , vastly superior to the Finns and upsetting the Swedes and Czechs from time to time . In 1976 Poland beat the dominant Soviet Union 6 - 4 in the World Championships after being soundly defeated by the same team 16 - 1 in the Winter Olympics . It was only the second time in 13 years that the Soviet Union had not won the gold . Poland also played well in the 1980 Olympics and finished seventh out of twelve teams . They managed to pull off a huge upset in their first game by beating Finland 5 - 4 , who would eventually advance to the medal round . In their next game , they played Canada and hoped to complete an even bigger upset . The Canadians didn ' t let this happen and beat the Poles 5 - 1 . In the third game , Poland took on the five time Gold Medalists , The Soviet Union . The players knew that this would be a challenge because they had played the Soviets many times before and had lost by usually very lopsided scores , such as 8 - 3 , 9 - 3 , 16 - 1 , and 20 - 0 . The Polish team , however , had also beaten the Soviets once in the 1976 World Championship and some of the players from that game were still on the team . The team tried to keep the Russians down , but it was too much and the USSR stormed to an 8 - 1 win . With their toughest games out of the way , Poland would have one more chance to try and get to the Medal Round . They took on Holland and went down early in the first period but managed to tie it about four minutes later . The Dutch team scored twice more in the period to lead 3 - 1 . Polish hero Wieslaw Jobczyk ( who scored a hat trick in the 1976 upset against USSR ) scored to put Poland within one goal but Holland stormed back to get two more goals before the third period to make it 5 - 2 . The Polish ended up losing 5 - 3 and saw their hopes of the Medal round come to an end . They had one more game against Japan , who had not won any games in the tournament and only tied once . Poland burst out in the first period and scored 3 goals before twenty minutes had ended . They scored two more goals and Japan seemed out of it . The final score was 5 - 1 for Poland . The team ' s final record was 2 - 3 - 0 and received 4 points in the standings . By the early 1980s , though , the Polish economy went into the tail spin and the money for the hockey programs vanished . Despite this Poland has managed to produce some NHL caliber talent including Mariusz Czerkawski with the New York Islanders , Peter Sidorkiewicz for both the Hartford Whalers and the Ottawa Senators , and Krzysztof Oliwa for the New Jersey Devils where he won a Stanley Cup in 1999 - 2000 . Hockey was first played in Poland in 1922 . Three years later , four clubs in Warsaw established the Polish Ice Hockey Federation . The following year ( 1926 ) , Poland became a member of the International Ice Hockey Federation .