NHL Players Allowed to Participate in 2014 Winter Olympics

The NHL announced on Friday that it will pause the 2013-2014 season for two weeks in February, in order to allow players to participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

The twelve nations who will be competing in Men's Hockey in Sochi are Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

All twelve of those nations are expected to field at least some NHL players on their Olympic squads.

The nations who benefit the most from the NHL's decision are Canada and the U.S., because nearly all of the top prospective players for their national teams play in the NHL.  The other nations will field squads also including players from the various European leagues, but this decision is also beneficial to them, as a number of their top players also play in the NHL.

In the end, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman made the decision that should have been a foregone conclusion all along.  While there are valid concerns about compressing the missed games into a shorter timeframe, there was no way Bettman was going to be able to satisfy his league's North American constituencies without pausing the season to let the best players go compete for their respective countries.  

Canada especially has high hopes, as they are the defending Olympic champions from 2010 on their home ice in Vancouver.  Once the inclusion of NHL players became allowed with the 1998 Nagano Olympics, Canada began to flex their muscle in their national sport, winning two of the four gold medals since then.

The U.S. has taken home the silver twice in that span as well.  In the end, the NHL had to bow to the greater will of its two constituent countries, both of whom needed the NHL to pause the season in order to give themselves the best shot at Olympic glory.