NHL Agrees to Player Participation for 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina

NHL players are officially set to participate in the Olympics for the first time since the 2014 Sochi Games.

The IIHF and International Olympic Committee announced Wednesday that they have finalized an agreement with the NHL and the NHL Players' Association to allow NHL players to compete in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.

The agreement also "opened the door" for the possibility that NHL players will also be allowed to compete during the 2030 French Alps Olympics, according to the IIHF.

The 2026 Olympic men's tournament will feature 12 teams, each of which announced their first six players on June 16.

The preliminary Team USA and Team Canada rosters are dominated by NHL players, with Auston Matthews, Brady Tkachuk, Matthew Tkachuk, Jack Eichel, Quinn Hughes and Charlie McAvoy leading the Americans while Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Brayden Point and Sam Reinhart headline the Canadians.

NHL players were first allowed to participate in the Olympics during the 1998 Nagano Games. That continued through 2014, where T.J. Oshie helped Team USA defeat Russia in a shootout before Crosby and Team Canada won gold in Sochi.

The NHL then prohibited players from participating in the 2018 Olympics, a decision commissioner Gary Bettman said at the time was because the league didn't want to disrupt the season "for almost three weeks in February when there’s no football, no baseball, there’s only basketball and us," (h/t the New York Times' Ben Shpigel.)

Other professional leagues, like Russia's KHL, suspended their seasons in order to allow players to compete. Olympic athletes from Russia, who were not allowed to compete under their country's flag due to IOC penalties regarding an alleged state-sponsored doping scheme, won gold behind tournament MVP and former NHL star Ilya Kovalchuk.

The NHL again kept players out of the tournament for the 2022 Beijing Games, citing "the profound disruption to the NHL’s regular-season schedule" caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shortening the 2020-21 campaign.

That year, Finland won men's hockey Olympic gold for the first time in history, with Hannes Bjorninen of Switzerland's National League scoring the winning goal.

The NHL announced in February 2024 that the league planned to participate in the 2026 and 2030 Olympics, while restarting the World Cup of Hockey to alternate every two years with the Games. That was made official on Wednesday when the agreement with the players' union, IIHF and IOC was finalized in Zurich.

With NHL players back at the tournament, and Russian teams banned from the 2026 Games as part of the IOC's sanctions regarding the invasion of Ukraine, Team USA and Team Canada will enter the tournament as favorites for the gold.

Canada is looking to win the tournament for the first time since 2014, while the United States is hoping to win a gold medal in Olympic men's hockey for the first time since the 1980 "Miracle on Ice."

The tournament will take place from Feb. 11-22, 2026. Complete rosters will be announced in early 2026, according to the IIHF.