Dan Sanford

Sports Editor

das6267@psu.edu

The National Hockey League, the NHL Players’ Association, the International Ice Hockey Federation, and International Olympic Committee agreed Friday to return players from the world’s most renowned hockey league to the Olympics for the first time since 2014.

This decision comes after years of deliberation and discussions between the groups, with the NHL’s primary concern being that the games make too much of a disruption to their season when it is not held in North America. This position led to the North American teams in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, being composed of minor league players, rather than players in the NHL. Other nations also were affected; the Russian team could not have Alexander Ovechkin, nor could Finland have Aleksander Barkov on their roster, for instance.

The Russian team, who had been branded that year as the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” as the result of a doping scandal uncovered months before the event, was composed of several Russian ex-NHL players who now were members of the KHL, the NHL’s closest major league competitor; the team easily won ice hockey’s gold medal.

While the prospect of Olympic events with NHL players is exciting, the event is not without restrictions in a pandemic-stricken world and security will be very tight in Beijing. The Chinese government will be enforcing a bubble in which players are not allowed to travel outside of; it is likely that any participating player must be fully vaccinated to participate and many other COVID-19 related restrictions will be in place. Testing will be required daily and activities like walking around and sightseeing or even visiting other players within the village they are visiting will also most likely be forbidden; GPS monitoring and daily activity plans may even be required. 

The United States’ team will be coached by two-time Stanley Cup winning bench boss Mike Sullivan, who won back-to-back Stanley Cup titles with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2016 and 2017. He will be joined by assistants Todd Reirden, who recently rejoined Sullivan as an assistant coach in Pittsburgh, as well as Nashville Predators head coach John Hynes, former New York Rangers coach David Quinn and recently-retired Anaheim Ducks goaltender Ryan Miller as further assistants. The tournament is expected to take place from February 9th through the 20th, 2022. Initial rosters have to be submitted by October 15th, 2021, with the official rosters being announced in January 2022.