Canada's Jamie Benn (centre) celebrates scoring a goal during the Men's Ice Hockey Semifinal match between the U.S. and Canada at the Bolshoy Ice Dome during the Sochi Winter Olympics on Feb. 21, 2014.AFP/Getty Images
The last time Canada played in a true best-on-best international men’s hockey tournament, Martin St. Louis, now 48, was on the roster. Roberto Luongo, 44, was the backup goalie. Patrick Marleau was there, and he was still young.
It’s been a decade since that Olympic tournament in Sochi. In the interim, a generation of Canadian NHL stars has hit midcareer without ever putting on the Maple Leaf in a for-all-the-marbles situation.
Everyone involved is diminished by that. People admire Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar et al, but no one rates them. Not in the way they rate your Crosbys and Gretzkys. Because if you haven’t won on Team Canada, never mind haven’t played, then you can’t be in the best-ever conversation.
This isn’t a scandal in the NHL because everyone’s to blame, so it suits all interests to never speak of it.
However, you would imagine that 10 years in the wilderness would have wised everyone up. But no. The NHL and its players have never seen a closing door they wouldn’t like to stick their hand into.
The latest brainwave from a league that cannot organize one lousy off-season tournament is a different, worse off-season tournament.
Leveraging the recent swing through Sweden – you booked a charter and a suite of hotel rooms, congratulations – the NHL is floating an Olympic spoiler.
Through their media partners, they are proposing a four-country tournament in 2025 featuring Canada, the United States and two European countries. Maybe Sweden and Finland. A World Cup this is not. Four countries doesn’t even make a decent trade conference.
In the current scenario, Canada plays the U.S., the Euros play each other, then they switch, and then they have a championship game. I’m a fan of sporting brevity, but seven games is not an international tournament. It’s a preseason warm-up.
The proposed date for this quick hit – February, 2025. Remember when the NHL could no longer countenance the Olympics because it was interrupting the season? I guess the statute of limitations on “told ya so” has passed.
What itch does this scratch exactly? Because it isn’t a best-on-best international tournament. It’s some-on-some. It proves nothing, and excites no one.
The NHL and NHLPA had the perfect set-up at the Olympics. They weren’t paid to do it, but these people strut around like Madison Avenue geniuses. If they can’t figure out how to turn a couple of hundred million eyeballs into a few bucks then I don’t know what to say for them.
Greed was an accelerant, but naiveté ruined it. The league didn’t realize the players hated them even more than they loved money. Now, because of politics, it’s too late to fix it.
You can’t stage a serious international hockey competition without inviting Russia. But you can’t stage an international hockey competition everyone else will come to if Russia is invited.
It’s a conundrum. The NHL isn’t good with those.
During decades of relative peace we have all forgotten that the International Olympic Committee’s purpose is not just making itself monstrously rich. Its other job is staging a sporting event that stands removed from the conflicts of the day.
Every Olympics has featured both sides of multiple wars and quasi-wars. All that’s changed recently is that the West has suddenly woken up to a couple of them. Now we’re fighting about fighting, which is Strangelovian of us.
The IOC isn’t clear on much, but it has been clear on this – that it is not the Olympic movement’s job to sort the good from the bad. Everyone’s invited.
The IOC is the solution to the NHL’s Russia problem. It won’t be one everybody likes, but the issue will be solved without the league’s weakness for swinging in whatever direction social media is blowing that day.
Having waited this long, hockey may as well wait another two-years-and-a-bit to get this right. If everyone stands behind the idea now, the NHL can build up a marketing head of steam. Who knows? Milan/Cortina 2026 could be the Olympics that turns the world into hockey fans. Probably not. But it’s got a better shot than U.S.-Sweden in Malmo at the Volvo Invitational for none of the marbles.
The NHL’s other new idea is reviving the World Cup – which suggests it -vived in the first place, and that’s debatable – and doing it in tandem with the Olympics, post-Milan. So after a long period of no international hockey, we will get constant international hockey.
That still won’t work because of the Russia problem (which, by then, has a non-zero chance of being a Third World War problem).
Plus, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the same 50 or 60 top players don’t want to tack on a high intensity mini-season every second year. Those guys don’t need a World Cup to make extra cash. They’ve already got gambling. So the World Cup squad becomes a Spengler Cup squad – filled out by whomever you can scrub up.
Some sports are good at doing international. Soccer, for instance. In the course of his career, Lionel Messi has played in five World Cups, five Copa Americas, won an Olympic gold and scored internationally against 37 countries. That is how you bring your best product to the worldwide market.
Which romantic foreign opponent has McDavid scored against recently? Nobody. Nobody at all for a long time. Not since he was a teenager.
But all of a sudden, after the NHL puts four teams who travel constantly on a transatlantic flight, they’re acting like they’ve had a Eureka moment.
They have not. The NHL and NHLers must accept they are not international people. They are stay-at-home types. On the one hand, there are glamorous cosmopolitan types such as Messi. On the other hand, there’s them. There is no point fighting it.
If they go abroad again after a long absence, let an international agency who handles such things make all the arrangements.
Putting the Olympics in complete charge won’t eliminate the possibility of future screw-ups. The NHL could get lost on a one-stop bus journey. But it would free them of the worry of disappearing for another 10 years just as every other sport in the world is going global.
Cathal Kelly