It’s official.
After years of seesawing by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) and the NHL, it was confirmed Sept. 3 that NHL players will be allowed to participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The decision is complicated and is ultimately about more than just the game.
This will be the first appearance for NHL players in the Olympics since 2014. The NHL did not send its players to the games in 2018, citing concerns about disruptions to its schedule. This time around, the league will shut down for three weeks in February 2022 to allow players to participate.
The decision has been met with much criticism, with arguments against it including the ever-persistent COVID-19 pandemic, disruption to the NHL schedule and China’s human rights abuses. However, for those removed from these issues, the announcement was one of joy and excitement.
The main selling point of the Olympics has always been the promise of “best-on-best” competition and that was missing in 2018, when NHL players didn’t participate. Rosters instead featured primarily amateur players from around the world, aside from the Russian team, which selected its players from the professional Kontinental Hockey League (KHL).
Although this did help to level the playing field across countries and allowed a developing hockey nation like Germany to advance to the Gold Medal Game, the Olympics are fundamentally a competition. Fans expect to see each nation’s very best and for many, the 2018 Olympics will always have an asterisk attached.
Now that the NHL is returning to the Olympics, such an asterisk will no longer be necessary.
The reaction from players around the league to the 2022 news has also been overwhelmingly positive. After the news broke, Edmonton Oilers centre Connor McDavid—who will likely serve as the face of the 2022 Canadian team—shared the sentiment of many Canadians.
“For any Canadian kid growing up playing the game, you want to play in the NHL, you want to win a Stanley Cup,” McDavid told NHL.com. “Right there next on the list is representing your country at the Olympics and winning a gold medal.”
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What is in it for the NHL? After all, the NHL is a business and requires some concessions to allow players to compete in the Olympics.
One of them is the IIHF covering insurance costs for players in case of injury, which was a major talking point at the 2014 Olympics. At those games, several players sustained season-ending injuries, leaving their respective NHL clubs in the lurch. As an additional fail-safe, the NHL reserves the right to pull players out of the games before they begin.
But once these concerns are put aside, the benefits for the NHL are huge. Namely, the impact it could have in China, the host nation. Home to over 1.4 billion people, China represents a massive, untapped market for the sport of hockey.
The league doesn’t need to look further than the NBA, which realized the vast potential of the Chinese market in the 1980s and 1990s with broadcast deals and exhibition games. The result was an entire generation growing up with basketball ingrained in their mainstream culture. In a best-case scenario, the NHL could achieve the same type of success.
The NHL’s entry into the Chinese market becomes even more significant when considering the state of grassroots hockey in Canada. Hockey registration has shrunk by more than 15 per cent since the 2014-15 season. With the threats posed by the pandemic, registration is likely to only decrease further.
The reality is that hockey is an expensive sport that favours privileged families who can cover its costs. It is also primarily white and far and away the least diverse of the major professional sports leagues. China, with a rapidly emerging middle class, has the ability to grow and diversify the game at a grassroots level.
Despite the buffet of opportunities presented to the NHL, there are major ethical concerns in China that the NHL, like many businesses, may choose to ignore. Most distressing is China’s genocide of the Uyghur ethnic group and the arrest of Canada’s two Michaels.
China’s human rights abuses have led to many actors reconsidering the ethics of the 2022 Olympic games as a whole. There have been various boycott attempts against the games with limited success. At this point, any withdrawals from the games will be at the discretion of individual leagues and nations, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has shown no signs of cancelling or postponing the games.
It seems very unlikely that the NHL would take it upon itself to withdraw from the games due to the crisis, as it typically prefers to remain socially conservative, as seen in the league’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
While health and human rights should be the first priority, the IOC, IIHF and NHL are businesses, meaning they require returns on their investments. Despite huge ethical concerns, it appears as if the NHL’s drive for profit will outmatch its drive for equity.
