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Even before Marty Walsh took the job as head of the NHL Players’ Association, he started to hear the same refrain.
In interviews for the job, he’d ask players about their priorities. Get us back into best-on-best competition and back into the Olympics, he was told.
After skipping the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, the NHL had come close to a return in 2022. Contracts were signed, the league’s calendar included a long break in February for players to go to Beijing. The pandemic, and subsequent restrictions on athletes who traveled to China for the Olympics, caused the league to pull out in December 2021.
By the time Walsh was named head of the NHLPA in March 2023, there was no pandemic to worry about. So the conversation quickly got serious about 2026.
After more than a decade without NHL players going to the Olympics, and with an entire generation of the league’s best players never given the opportunity to play in any kind of best-on-best competition, there was broad agreement that something had to give.
“There was never really a negotiation with the NHL,” Walsh told The Post. “It was basically right out the gate, mutually agreed upon that we want to get NHL players back into the Olympics, from Day 1, pretty much.”
It is, of course, one thing to be on the same page about wanting to go to the Olympics, and another thing entirely to make it happen.
On the NHL side, the Olympics come with a particular stumbling block. If they allow their players to go, it is, essentially, the highest-profile hockey event in the world, and the league itself has no control over it and cannot profit off it, at least not directly.
“We have to disappear for two weeks at the height of our season,” commissioner Gary Bettman told The Post. “Which means content for the website, for dot-com, for the radio station, for social media, from us, disappears to a large extent, because we don’t get [intellectual property] rights from the IOC.
“We have to have a compressed schedule. We have to take into account that NHL teams send various amounts of players to the Olympics. Teams like Tampa and the Panthers send 10 players each and we’ve got some teams sending one or two players. Teams are gonna come back in a different place in terms of how they are than when we left. The fact of the matter is, some teams are gonna have a good chunk of their roster a little more tired and banged up.”
Those concerns were shelved during negotiations with the IOC and IIHF for a few reasons.
First, the agreement to go to the Olympics also came with the agreement to hold the 4 Nations Face-Off and, starting in 2030, the World Cup of Hockey. That is a win-win: Players are more than happy to get more opportunities to play best-on-best, and judging by the rousing success of the 4 Nations last season, the World Cup — over which the league does have control — will be a ratings bonanza and cash cow.
“I think having this consistent schedule moving forward is gonna change the dynamics as far as the fan experience,” Walsh said. “I’m from Boston, I hear it all the time: Is there gonna be another 4 Nations? I try to explain to people, we have a World Cup of Hockey. … I think it’s important for us that people want to see this tournament, make it exciting. That [growth] will be measured at some point; I don’t think you can measure it yet.”
Second, going back to the Olympics was a major priority for the players. It helped, too, that Walsh, unlike certain predecessors, established a strong relationship with Bettman early and the league also recognized that, though the Olympics stood to benefit most from their presence, being there would help grow the game.
Third, negotiations with the IOC and IIHF went well. Costs such as transportation and insurance — the latter of which has turned into an ongoing issue at the World Baseball Classic — needed to be shouldered by those parties. Medical standards identical to the NHL’s were also incorporated.
“Certainly, we weren’t going to pay for the privilege of shutting down,” Bettman said.
The IOC agreed to write the check, so that hurdle was cleared.
“What was not on the list [of issues],” Walsh said, “was the ice. Know what I mean?”
The last hurdle
The first thing that needs to be said about the Santagiulia Arena in Milan is that it is expected to be complete, or, better put, complete enough to stage a competition.
That such a thing was recently in question, though, is a problem unto itself. And if not for the determination of the players, who have taken an attitude that they will play in the Olympics come hell or high water, it’s certainly possible that the state of the arena would be threatening the tournament at large.
The Santagiulia Arena, which will stage most of the men’s games and both the men’s and women’s gold medal games, will have a capacity of approximately 3,000 fewer seats than planned because of construction issues.
Construction of 14 dressing rooms is coming down to the wire, the luxury suites are unfinished, the dimensions of the ice are off by a few feet, the first test event wasn’t held until just a few weeks ago and featured a stoppage of play due to a hole in the ice. The practice rink, which is adjacent to the game rink, has been slow to complete too, though The Post was told last week that it is on schedule.
The good news, relatively speaking, is that the hole in the ice is baked into the expectations for the first game on a new sheet of ice, and not quite as alarming as it sounds. The bad news is, well, pretty much everything else. The ice may be playable, but that is different from the ice being good.
“I was disappointed that the arena wasn’t as much of a priority as we had hoped,” Bettman said. “That they [hadn’t] begun building it sooner, so this wasn’t a bit of a fire drill down the end.”
The NHL and the NHLPA have both tried to keep things diplomatic regarding a situation that will at best narrowly avoid being a total embarrassment. But when Walsh and Bettman spoke to The Post in mid-January, their frustration was obvious.
“I just think when you’re building something like this for the Olympics, I would have thought a sense of urgency would have settled in a lot earlier, where you would have this thing done,” Walsh said. “… You’re talking about the world coming to your city and your country, you would hope that the arena would have been looking — not actually world class — but complete.
“From what I understand, they’re working around the clock now. They just started to work around the clock. Quite honestly, they should’ve been working around the clock all along. If it was coming to my city and I was in charge, I’d say let’s get this thing done.”
The NHL’s agreement with the IOC includes the 2030 Games, where hockey will be played in the Stade de Nice in France — a venue that already exists as a soccer stadium, but which will need to be fitted for hockey and divided into two indoor arenas.
The hope is that Kirsty Coventry, who was appointed head of the IOC last year and thus is not taking the brunt of the blame for the current situation, prevents something similar from happening four years from now.
“My expectation is that they learned from the experience,” Bettman said. “And hopefully we won’t see a repetition of it.”
Russia, Russia, Russia
Another point of contention in this return to best-on-best competition: the exclusion of Team Russia, which has been expelled from international competition due to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
That decision — as regards both the Olympics and the 2028 World Cup of Hockey — is essentially out of the NHL’s hands, and perhaps even the IOC’s.
First and foremost, the political echelon in European countries would need to be comfortable with the idea of their national teams playing on the same sheet of ice as Russia’s, an inherently uncomfortable thought given the propaganda value of sport. That question might even supersede those involving ongoing ceasefire negotiations, or the Trump administration’s relative warmth toward Vladimir Putin.
“I wouldn’t isolate the United States because of what’s going on here with the president and his relationship, or lack thereof, with Putin,” said Walsh, who was secretary of labor under Joe Biden when Russian soldiers began marching toward Kyiv. “Nobody’s said to us, ‘Let the Russians play,’ as far as political leadership. It’s a world issue and I think it has to be resolved on a world stage.
“I don’t think Canada and the United States can even begin to open the door here. It really has to be Europe.”
It’s little secret that Russian players want to participate, though most have refrained from commenting on the geopolitical situation, in large part because doing so could affect their families at home.
The IIHF and IOC have signaled openness to allowing Russian and Belarussian athletes at the youth level to play starting in 2028.
“That’s entirely their call,” Bettman said.
Drop the puck
Once the tournament begins with Slovakia facing Finland next Wednesday, though, it’s a safe bet that all the concerns will be relegated to the back burner.
If the hockey is good, then a global TV audience won’t care much about whether the luxury suites in the arena are complete, or even if the ice is as good as it could be.
It will be about hockey, Olympic best-on-best hockey, and the stage which produced Sidney Crosby’s golden goal, T.J. Oshie’s shootout heroics, Dominik Hasek carrying Czechia to gold, and the Miracle on Ice will have the spotlight shining on it again.
“I think there’s nothing, in any sport, that compares to our best-on-best,” Bettman said. “The energy, the excitement, the passion, the skill that our players bring to the game is extraordinary.”
Indeed, as the date has grown closer, the excitement to get to Italy has grown palpable in NHL circles. The players, after all, have waited 12 years for this.
“I think everyone’s just chomping at the bit,” Team USA winger Kyle Connor told The Post. “The intensity, the buzz, the awareness of what the 4 Nations brought, now to take that to the scale of the Olympics. As a player, just thrilled to be able to involve more countries as well.
“Just do best-on-best hockey. It’s what you want as a competitor.”
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