The return of NHL players to the Olympics at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games makes so much sense, it’s almost difficult to believe commissioner Gary Bettman agreed to let players represent their respective homelands in Italy and at a still-to-be-determined site in 2030 after holding them out of the two previous Olympic tournaments.
Persuading team owners that it would be worthwhile to pause the season for the Olympics was no small feat. Bettman, who this week celebrated his 32nd anniversary in office, still has that power. And this time he could guarantee they wouldn’t have to pay the hefty costs of players’ insurance or for housing them and their families at the Games, thanks to the International Ice Hockey Federation’s decision to take on that responsibility.
He framed it as a gift to players. But, as always, follow the money for the real motivation.
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“There is a recognition of how important this is to the players. And in the spirit of cooperation, particularly the work that we did together during COVID, everybody felt on our side that it was the right thing to do,” Bettman said Friday at a news conference in Toronto during the NHL’s All-Star weekend.
“This really came down to doing something because the players really wanted it,” he said as he sat beside Marty Walsh, executive director of the NHL Players’ Assn., and Luc Tardif, president of the International Ice Hockey Federation.
This will be the sixth tournament involving NHL players. The first was in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, followed by Salt Lake City in 2002; Turin, Italy, in 2006; Vancouver in 2010, and Sochi, Russia in 2014. The tournament will be played on NHL-sized rinks, as they were in 2010 and 2014.
The time difference between Italy and North America is more suitable for scheduling prime-time TV events in the U.S. than were the vast time differences between North America and South Korea in 2018 and between North America and China in 2022. Also crucial to Bettman’s…