NHL absence leaves Olympic hockey wide open
December 22, 2021
The news came as no real surprise to even casual followers of the National Hockey League (NHL). With a wave of positive COVID-19 tests forcing ever more games to be postponed in the past couple of weeks, it had long since become apparent that the NHL would need to try to use the two-week Olympic break to play catchup with the schedule.
"Given the profound disruption to the NHL's regular-season schedule caused by recent COVID-related events … Olympic participation is no longer feasible,'' NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman confirmed in a statement on Wednesday.
Disappointed stars
It will come as a severe disappointment for many of the game's biggest stars, including Connor McDavid or his Edmonton teammate, Leon Draisaitl of Germany, both of whom missed out on Pyeongchang 2018, when the NHL flatly refused to interrupt its season for a couple of weeks to send its players to South Korea. This time, the NHL had agreed to go — if the pandemic allowed it.
Draisaitl was one of the first players to express his feelings.
"I would have loved to have been on the ice there for Germany. An Olympic tournament with the best players in the world would have been something special," Draisaitl said.
No best-on-best for a while
Many fans will also be disappointed, not having seen a best-on-best ice hockey tournament since the 2014 Sochi Winter Games — unless you count the NHL-organized 2016 World Cup of Hockey, in which teams like Germany didn't even exist, since the few Germans invited were part of a "Team Europe." And that's just not the same as representing your country.
One thing COVID-19 has taught us over the past couple of years is that the only constant is unpredictability. Nobody knows where the pandemic will be on February 9th, when the men's tournament is scheduled to begin.
However, assuming it does go ahead as planned, you have to think the outcome is now much more of an unknown than it would have been with the NHL players.
NHL powerhouses
Going simply by the numbers, the countries with the most players in the best league in the world, Canada (406), USA (264) and Sweden (90) would have been the favorites to finish among the medals, if not dominate.
Russia, with just 50 players in the NHL, would have been very much in the mix as well, not just due to stars like Alexander Ovechkin, but also because its Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) is widely accepted to be the world's second-best league. Thus making the team sent by the Russian Olympic Committee to Beijing favorites to defend their gold medal.
Still, the absence of NHL players could provide an opening for teams like Germany (7 NHL players), the Czech Republic (31), Slovakia (11), or Latvia (5). As much as German coach Toni Söderholm will miss players like Draisaitl, Tim Stützle, Moritz Seider, or Philipp Grubauer, the bulk of his roster was always going to be made up of non-NHLers.
"Of course, it's a great pity, especially for our Germans in the NHL, because they really wanted to be at the Olympics," Söderholm told the SID news agency.
The Finnish coach, who was planning all along for the possibility that he would have to do without his biggest stars, added that Germany was always "going into the Olympic hockey tournament with confidence. With or without NHL players."
Once they get over the disappointment, Wednesday's decision is bound to raise hopes among fans of Germany, and perhaps other smaller hockey nations.
Miracle of Pyeongchang revisited?
In Pyeongchang, when the NHL players were also absent, then-German coach Marco Sturm's team stunned most by making it to the final — and were seconds away from winning the gold medal — before having to settle for silver. Still, this was by far Germany's best-ever performance at the men's Olympic ice hockey tournament.
Sturm, who is now an assistant coach with the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, is confident that Söderholm's men are capable of pulling off something special once again.
"Especially without the NHL players, everything would be possible again," he said recently.