Why the NHL Should Send Its Players to the 2018 Olympics

In 2018, some of the finest athletes in the world will gather in Pyeongchang, South Korea, to compete in the Winter Olympics.

Few events at the tournament will receive more attention than ice hockey, so it’s ironic that the event may end up being played between competitors who are clearly not the best in the world at the sport.

That’s because NHL players' participation is still in question. And as much as there are good reasons for the league not to close down for the Olympics, that’s a shame. The league should send its players to the Games.

Typically, the arguments made in favour of the NHL's involvement are selfish.

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It’s easy to forget that Gary Bettman, the league commissioner, was a key mover in the effort to get NHL players to the Games back in 1998. Bettman isn’t particularly known for his altruism, and he didn’t cast that decision as a selfless act when he talked about it to Joe Lapointe of the New York Times in 1997:

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The National Basketball Association's worldwide awareness grew dramatically after the participation of the Dream Team [in the 1992 Olympics]. We're going to get exposure like the world has never seen for hockey. This is about 120-plus of the world's elite hockey players playing for pride and playing for their countries. It will give us a tournament of high magnitude. It will be quite compelling.

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Bettman worked for the NBA in 1992. He saw the benefits of participating in the Olympics. The idea of giving the NHL a boost by sending its players to the Games was something he believed in.

There are other, more pragmatic reasons for the league to participate beyond simple exposure.

One of the simplest is that, as a rule, elite athletes like to compete for their respective countries. Washington Capitals superstar Alex Ovechkin has promised to play in the Games regardless of whether the NHL schedule is still running, as reported by ESPN’s Pierre LeBrun:

The allure of playing for the flag can be a powerful thing, and not just for the athletes. If the average fan is given the choice between watching Team USA face off against Russia or a largely meaningless Game 45 of an 82-game schedule for their preferred NHL club, the league may struggle to hold eyeballs.

Yet for all those benefits, shutting down for the Olympics isn’t a no-brainer for the league.

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Injury is often cited as a reason. Sending players to the Olympics means the season starts earlier, ends later and features a more compacted schedule. The league’s biggest stars, meanwhile, add the risk of playing in the tournament. In 2014, the New York Islanders lost captain John Tavares for the remainder of the season after he was injured while representing Team Canada at the Sochi Games.

Then there are limits to the exposure generated by the games. If Bettman got to script the tournament, the outcome would likely be Team USA triumphing over the Canadians in a prime-time gold-medal showdown.

Unfortunately for Bettman, the U.S. national team has been embarrassed in two successive best-on-best tourneys, and the time difference between the U.S. and South Korea (the latter is 13 hours ahead of ET) doesn’t do the league any favours in terms of when those games would be broadcast.

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The league may have some reservations about its partners too. Both the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have their own goals, objectives that don’t always perfectly align with the NHL’s interests.

The IOC’s checkered reputation is an additional cause for concern. Even if we’re past the nasty bribery scandal of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, there’s still the matter of the growing backlash to the Olympics, detailed by ESPN’s Johnette Howard, and the rather ludicrous demands of the committee which helped push Oslo out of the running for the 2022 Olympics, reported by Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley.

It’s also worth noting at that a May 2016 report from the Guardian’s Owen Gibson revealed that a French investigation into corruption in sport had been expanded to consider the 2016 and 2020 Olympic bids.

Ultimately, these decisions generally seem to come down to money. Predictably, the question of who will pay insurance and travel costs for NHL players is an issue once again. Ed Willes, in an excellent piece for the National Post back in June, reported that the IOC doesn’t want to cover the bill and neither does the NHL. Unless the IOC backs down, the Olympics are likely to be a non-starter for the league.

That’s a shame. The NHL should send its players to the Olympics if possible despite the potential downside. It’s not just a matter of exposure but one of goodwill.

Since 1998, hockey fans have had the chance to watch the best players in the world go head-to-head on the largest possible stage, one the NHL’s World Cup of Hockey is merely a pale imitation of. It’s a tournament that competes with the Stanley Cup Final in terms of intensity and surpasses it in terms of team quality.

Hockey fans have stuck with the NHL through labour disputes, constantly escalating ticket prices and the disappearance of high-scoring games. It simply wouldn’t be fair to take the Olympics away from them too.