NHL Players Won't Play in Winter Olympics If Ice Is Unsafe, Deputy Commissioner Says

Whether NHL players are able to play in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics will depend on if Milan's hockey arena is safe to play in by February, deputy commissioner Bill Daly told reporters Monday.

"If the ice is unplayable, the ice is unplayable... Obviously, if the players feel the ice is unsafe, we're not going to play," Daly said Monday, per NHL.com's Dan Rosen. "It's as simple as that."

His comments come amid delays on construction of the Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena in Milan, where a test event scheduled for early December recently had to be rescheduled for Jan. 9.

Daly told reporters Monday he is "cautiously optimistic" NHL players will still be able to participate when the men's Olympic hockey tournament begins Feb. 11.

NHL Players' Association assistant executive director Ron Hainsey also cited player safety when recently telling Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman the decision as to whether NHL players can participate would come down to ice quality.

"The health and safety of our players while playing on any surface will not be compromised," Hainsey told Friedman.

Daly told reporters Monday that the venue would receive guidance from NHL ice technicians including senior director of facilities operations Derek King, and that the NHL would have access to ice testing until February, per Rosen.

Whether or not the league deems Milan's ice ultimately safe to play on won't depend on the rink matching NHL regulation sizes, although the International Ice Hockey Federation reportedly previously agreed to meet those dimension requirements.

The IIHF confirmed Monday the Olympic ice rink will be 196.85 feet long, more than three feet short of the 200-meter standard set by the NHL.

"All involved, the IIHF, the Organizing Committee, NHL, NHLPA, IOC and the relevant venue authorities agree that the differences in rink specifications are insignificant, and should not impact either the safety or quality of game play," the Olympic organizers said in a statement.

Daly said Monday he thought "the IIHF was under the impression they had a different interpretation of what NHL ice meant than we would have."

"Even at the site visits I'm not sure it was anything that was perceptible to anybody. It's not like people bring tape measures there," Daly said, per Rosen.

He added that the NHL and NHL Players' Association "have made the IIHF very aware that when we participate in the Olympics in 2030, we expect it to be NHL ice surface."

NHL players haven't participated in the Olympics since the 2014 Sochi Games. Whether that changes in 2026 could come down to whether the International Olympic Committee is able to take a step forward in completing the rink. In late Novemebr, the NHL gave the IOC a one-month deadline to show progress in construction, according to Friedman.