Scott Stinson: Maybe Gary Bettman was right about NHL players at the Olympics
Of course the hockey has been thrilling in Milan, but it also isn't necessary
By: Scott Stinson
When the Canadian men’s team played the United States for the gold medal at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, I was on the way home from Florida.
My wife and I watched the game in a hotel room in Savannah, Ga., which is to say I watched it while she mostly slept. She was pregnant with our first kid at the time.
I can still remember sitting on the end of the bed, watching in a state of near-panic that turned into joy.
Eight years later, at Vancouver 2010, I was home, prone on my couch, with a kid basically sitting on me. (Not the one born in 2002, mercifully.) When Sidney Crosby scored to win gold for Canada, I bolted upright and whooped, and the poor child was quite startled.
All of which is to say, I have greatly enjoyed having NHL players in the Olympics. They have delivered some of my happiest hockey-fan memories, and not only because my local team is the Maple Leafs.
But, NHL players shouldn’t be the Olympics.
I know, I know: What madness is this? Was I not watching on Wednesday when Canada scored late in the third period to tie their quarter-final game against the plucky Czechs, and when Mitch Marner scored the overtime winner? Was that not awesome?
Of course it was. Any time the best players in the world are wearing their national jerseys, it produces incredible, high-skill hockey that usually ends up in heart-stopping moments.
It just doesn’t need to be doing that at the Olympics, when for two weeks every four years people are actually paying attention to the many winter sports that are otherwise largely ignored. The NHL players, because they are stars, naturally suck up a ton of oxygen in Olympic coverage — and I’m not blaming the media here, because it is just covering the event that is of the most importance to a lot of Canadian viewers and readers.
The last two Winter Olympics, because there were no NHL players present, allowed the travelling Canadian media horde to cover more athletes who had great stories of their own, and who will end up getting overlooked this time around while reporters are getting Sidney Crosby injury updates and live-tweeting Canadian line combinations at practice.
You might say: But it’s the Olympics. The reason everyone cares so much is that this event is the pinnacle of international sport.
Which is true, except for the sports in which it is not the pinnacle. In soccer, the most popular sport on the planet, that would be the World Cup. Regional competitions like the Copa America and the Euros are a close second. Because those competitions have a history and weight of their own, men’s soccer at the Olympics is mostly a curiosity, with youth teams instead of the senior national teams.
Rugby has its own World Cup, which carries much more significance in the eyes of national-team fans than the version of the sport that is played at the Olympics. Cricket isn’t at the Olympics at all, and yet cricket-playing nations still manage to battle for global supremacy at regular international contests. (You will note I am a little vague on the details here. All I know about cricket is that the matches last for literal days and they wear nice knit sweaters.)
Hockey could, of course, have its own non-Olympic international tournaments and in fact it has, many times. Canadian hockey fans have loved them in whatever form they have taken, from the 1972 Summit Series to the 1987 Canada Cup to the 2016 World Cup to last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off.
Just writing them out like that hints at the problem: the damn things are staged erratically, and with ever-changing formats. The NHL swore up and down that it was committed to a regular World Cup when it hosted the 2016 edition, even though that competition had some goofy wrinkles like a Team Europe (basically the non-Scandinavian nations) and a Team North America of younger Canadians and Americans. And then it managed to wait eight years before reprising it, but this time with just four teams due to Russia’s pariah-state status.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has always taken a dim view of Olympic participation, citing the IOC’s strict refusal to let the NHL have any kind of partnership with the Olympics while the Games are on. The league can’t share highlights, can’t even mention the word ‘Olympics’ on its channels, but has to shut down midseason while its best players go off to chase glory. And while I thought — and wrote — that it was dumb for the NHL to not go to Korea and China, that was because no suitable alternative was in place for the best-on-best hockey that promotes the sport and, indirectly, the NHL.
But the experience of the 4 Nations Face-Off last winter proved that the Olympic rings aren’t necessary to provide thrilling, high-stakes hockey. I’ll confess I was a 4 Nations skeptic — it began as a filler to replace the increasingly irrelevant All-Star Game — but it took about five minutes of watching the actual games to realize it was going to be great.
If the NHL and its players union could ever get aligned for long enough to sort out the logistics of an actual quadrennial World Cup, I don’t doubt that it would quickly become a huge part of the hockey calendar, and cause everyone to forget about Olympic hockey. Especially because it wouldn’t have to be a mini-tournament shoehorned into the middle of the NHL calendar.
But again I have hinted at the problem: The players like the Olympics. This generation of NHL stars were probably sitting on couches and hotel-room beds, just like I was, and watching national-team players fight for Olympic gold. And so, Olympic participation has become a collective-bargaining item, a carrot for the league to dangle as it tries to negotiate some kind of concession from the players. The players would be doing themselves a favour if they kept the Olympics off their list of demands and worried instead about locking in a real World Cup alternative.
Will I be watching when Canada plays Finland in Milan on Friday morning? Yes. Will I be far too emotionally invested if they end up playing for the gold medal on Sunday? Also yes.
But I’m quite certain I’d feel the same way about a hockey World Cup, if such a thing wasn’t an occasional occurrence.
Scott Stinson is a journalist based in suburban Toronto and contributor to The Line. He has covered four Olympics.
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You are 100000% correct, I think. I was always under the impression the Olympics was supposed to be amateur athletes.
Very good point; Olympics should be a hockey scout's dream, and every junior player's also.