Over on Facebook last week, long-time reader Jay Kumar asked me what I thought of the NHL holding an in-season tournament in 2025 featuring the USA, Canada, Sweden and Finland co-sponsored by the National Hockey League (NHL) and National Hockey League Players Association. Billed as the “Four Nations Faceoff,” it’s being held as a prelude to NHL players returning to the Winter Olympics in 2026.1
That’s one heck of an interruption of league play, so the NHL will hold the tournament in lieu of the NHL All-Star Game which will return in 2026.2
The short answer is that I’ll watch, as there are sure to be some entertaining games. After all, these are four of the best nations in international ice hockey. USA-Canada promises to be raucous both on and off the ice.3 Sweden-Finland is always a battle. Sweden ruled Finland for a couple of centuries, the Finns haven’t forgotten about it and the only place they can take it out on their next door neighbors is at the rink.
While the other games won’t be infused with political rivalry, don’t count them out. One of the most competitive games in the history of international ice hockey was Canada’s double overtime win over Sweden in the semifinal of the 1996 World Cup of Hockey. And the Finns are a tough squad that punches far above its weight in international ice hockey considering their population is just 5.6 million.4
Unfortunately, due to political and logistical considerations, a number of great hockey nations will be excluded. The Czech Republic wasn’t included and David Pastrnak, the nation’s best player, isn’t happy about it. Who could blame him? Of course, if you had included the Czechs you should have included the Slovaks too. Others have noted that Leon Draisaitl, a German, is one of the league’s greatest talents. How could you have a legitimate international tournament that didn’t include him?
The elephant in the room, or the bear, if you will, is the absence of Russia, which along with Belarus is currently being sanctioned by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) over the invasion of Ukraine. The ban is reviewed on a yearly basis, so there is a chance that it will be lifted in time for both nations to participate the 2026 Winter games in Italy.
You will get no prediction from me as to whether that will happen in time or not. But what I do know is that any ice hockey competition that excludes the Russians will be flawed at some level. The international game didn’t become the international game we know today until the Russians, competing as part of the USSR, arrived on the scene.
The program, built from nothing after World War II by Anatoly Tarasov — only bandy, a version of field hockey played on ice was known to Russia beforehand — came to dominate the game in the midst of the Cold War. Tarasov led the Soviets to nine world titles and three Olympic gold medals before being fired after the 1972 Winter Olympics. Though he wasn’t involved in any of the three greatest games in international hockey history: Game Eight of the 1972 Canada-Russia Summit Series; the January 1976 clash between the Philadelphia Flyers and CSKA Moscow; and the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, none of those games could have happened without the tireless work — and often brutal methods — that built the Russian game.5
Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians haven’t quite dominated ice hockey the way they did before, but the talent is still there. The season that Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov is having right now is an object lesson of that unassailable fact. Winning any ice hockey tournament without the Russians in the field simply won’t be the same.
When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was a great personal relief. I had spent my college years studying international politics, and most of those courses were consumed with the Soviet Union and its rivalry with the USA. That we’ve returned to something that resembles those days has left me sad and angry. I feel especially sad for young people around the world today who may now have to grow up with the fear of nuclear annihilation that previous generations had to endure.
We muddled our way through before, and I’m sure we’ll find a way to do it again.
“Four Nations” evokes echoes of the Six Nations rugby tournament that pits the best rugby teams of the Northern Hemisphere against one another. I get it, but hockey deserves to have traditions of its own, and shouldn’t just piggy back off of the tradition of others.
In 2026, the NHL All-Star Game will be held at UBS Arena, home of the New York Islanders. The rink is only a few minutes from the house I grew up in, so I may have to go. I would have liked an opportunity to see the game at the NHL rink in Washington, DC, but for some reason, the league has never deigned to award the game to the area after the 34th edition of the game was played at the Capital Centre in 1982. Normally, the league likes to see the game hosted at new arenas, but for some reason has never awarded the game to the Capital One Arena, opened as MCI Center in December 1997. Come to think of it, the arena has never hosted an NHL Draft either. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
The tournament will be held in two cities: one in Canada, and one in the USA. If the organizers know what’s good for them, Minneapolis will be the American site.