Without NHL players, Olympic men's hockey just doesn't matter | Opinion
BEIJING — Here’s some free advice to anyone who is outraged, saddened or otherwise inconvenienced by the U.S. men’s hockey team absolutely blowing its Olympic quarterfinal Wednesday against Slovakia: Don’t bother.
Oh, who are we kidding? If you’ve been paying attention to the nice little hockey story that had been brewing over the last week, you already knew the deal with this team of college kids and journeymen nobody’s ever heard of. If you just jumped on the bandwagon because Team USA had swept into the quarterfinals without a loss, you didn’t invest much in the first place.
So we can talk about the U.S. screwing up power plays in the third period if you want. We can break down how they gave up the tying goal to Slovakia with 43.7 seconds left when the semifinals were in their grasp. We pore over the details of going 0-for-5 in the penalty shootout – on second thought, let’s not – and the missed opportunity for USA Hockey to get into the medal rounds. From a hockey standpoint, it was all pretty ugly stuff.
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But what’s the point?
And therein lies the problem with a second consecutive hockey tournament at the Olympics without NHL players: Why should anyone care about this product at all?
We’ve seen what happens when the best players in the world come to the Winter Games. We’ve seen what it means to a multi-millionaire Stanley Cup winner like Sidney Crosby to beat the U.S. in overtime in a gold medal game in his home country. We’ve seen the mental and physical frustration of the American team trying to get a puck past Carey Price in an edge-of-your-seat semifinal in Sochi.
And now we’ve seen, for back-to-back Winter Olympics, what it looks like when the countries that care most about hockey (save Russia) send their fifth stringers. Spoiler alert: It ain’t pretty.
Look, we get why NHL commissioner Gary Bettman hates the Olympics. It’s a massive inconvenience for his league to stop the season for two weeks in February, not to mention the injury risk players incur by participating. When NHL stars finally made it to the 1998 Winter Games, you could argue there was some benefit for a league trying to grow its fan base. By now, we know it’s unlikely there’s a lasting impact either way.
But for five consecutive Olympics, the NHL tolerated it because the players wanted to go. It meant something to the best Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Finns and Czechs to be able to play for their country on the world’s biggest sporting stage.
Sure, when the pros came, the Olympics lost the innocence of Herb Brooks and his team of college kids stunning the Soviet machine. But what it gained was phenomenal drama and the highest level of play, elevating Olympic hockey to one of the marquee events of the Games.
Now? Without NHL players, men’s hockey just doesn’t move the needle at all.
Everyone can judge for themselves how much the Olympics should matter in a sport where there are already well-established championships. Nobody would argue it’s as important as the Stanley Cup, just as nobody says the gold medal in tennis is an achievement equal to winning Wimbledon.
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But as long as competing here matters to the best players, and as long as it enriches the experience of the Games, it’s worth keeping. Without them, you're giving out a gold medal to mediocrity. That's not what the Olympics is supposed to be. If the current version of men’s hockey was dropped from the Olympic program, would anyone complain other than the Russians?
This was evident in 2018 when the NHL said it would not build an Olympic break into its schedule due to a financial dispute with the IOC, leaving most of the top hockey countries scrambling to put together teams. The Russians, sensing opportunity to win their first gold since the fall of the Soviet Union, stacked their team with the best players from the KHL, which is considered the second-best league in the world. It worked. Good for them.
But for everyone else, it was more of a bore than a curiosity. The hope was that Pyeongchang would be an anomaly, with NHL players returning in Beijing. Then COVID-19 hit forcing several games to be postponed, and the Chinese government’s strict protocols and the threat of quarantine understandably scared off the NHL.
After missing two straight Olympics, though, you wonder if it will be a priority for the NHL or the players to return in 2026 when the world will hopefully be back to some semblance of normal. By then, most of the veterans who cherished their Olympic experience will be retired or at the tail end of their careers. Players who will be 23 or 24 years old by the time Milano-Cortina rolls around will barely remember watching the Olympics in Sochi.
Maybe it will be a grand Olympic return for a new generation of NHL stars. Or maybe the entire concept will fade away. It’s impossible to know.
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For an American audience, it would have been a great story had Team USA advanced to the gold medal game. A bunch of fast, scrappy college kids beating grown men on the biggest stage is an easy storyline to fall in love with, and this team made it seem possible over the last week. They’d even beaten Canada’s group of no-names and has-beens on their way to the knockout round.
For the American players who couldn’t close out regulation against Slovakia and completely botched the penalty shots, the disappointment is real, just as the elation was for their opponents. For many of them on either side of the ice, this may be the biggest thing they ever play for, which is very much in the spirit of what the Olympics are supposed to be about.
“It was amazing, probably the biggest honor of my life to represent our country and play on the Olympic stage and just be a part of something bigger than hockey,” said 23-year old American goalie Strauss Mann. “To get to know a lot of great guys and help unite a country a little bit, that will last a lifetime.”
But without the attention and the passion of the world, the Olympics aren’t much different than the Swedish league games Mann plays in professionally.
Ultimately, it's not the NHL's responsibility to prop up the IOC's product. But whatever accommodations need to be made for NHL players in 2026, it would be in the IOC's best interest to prioritize getting them. With NHL players, Olympic hockey had something unique and special. Without them, it has almost nothing.