COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — It’s the conversation no one wants to be having right now, but the one the game’s highest stakeholders must engage in at this juncture.
NHLers are on the precipice of returning to the Olympics for the first time since 2014, and the arena housing the Milano-Cortina Games remains incomplete.
“It’s a joke,” said a member of one participating team’s management group we touched base with earlier this week.
Those convening at the Broadmoor Hotel for the NHL Board of Governor meetings this week won’t be laughing at the situation.
The players don’t appear amused, either.
They already aired their concerns, with the quality of the ice at the Milano Santa Giulia Arena chief among them.
Elliotte Friedman’s report on his weekly Saturday Headlines segment on Hockey Night in Canada featured a statement from NHLPA deputy director Ron Hainsey, who said, “The health and safety of our players while playing on any ice surface will not be compromised.”
This came just days after Team Canada assistant coach Peter DeBoer let it be known on an episode of Real Kyper and Bourne that the ice surface being prepared will be three to four feet shorter and just slightly wider than a standard NHL ice surface.
And in between DeBoer’s comments being made and Hainsey’s warning being issued, NHL deputy director Bill Daly told Daily Faceoff’s Matt Larkin, “If there’s no rink completed, there’s no NHL players going to the Olympics.”
None were featured at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, and COVID-19 pandemic prevented their return at the 2022 Beijing Games.
Commitments were made for the upcoming ones in Italy, and the NHL and NHLPA are demanding that the International Olympic Committee and the International Ice Hockey Federation deliver on theirs.
It was in the third week of November that the NHL and NHLPA imposed a one-month deadline on the IOC and IIHF to make the necessary progress on completing the arena. It’s expected they’ll update the governors this week on whether the project is trending according to schedule.
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Both the IOC and IIHF expressed confidence that the arena will be ready on time.
They have made no contingency plans so far to play the games elsewhere, and they haven’t expressed any intention of developing any.
Still, with every day that goes by, concern is mounting, making the subject unavoidable in Colorado Springs.
The governors are gathered here for meetings to receive the same updates they receive every December from the league — on whether revenues are meeting, falling short or exceeding pre-season projections — and to hear from the hockey operations department on player safety.
League business (team shares being sold/purchased) is also typically conducted at these meetings.
And Sportsnet can confirm The Athletic‘s report that this week’s sessions are expected to cover some of the new CBA rules that have already been implemented for this season, salary cap projections, the future of television rights in the United States (with the current partnerships with TNT and ESPN set to expire at the end of the 2027-28 season), and the plans for the return of the World Cup of Hockey in 2028.
While parties in Atlanta, Houston, Arizona and Quebec are believed to have previously expressed interest in owning NHL teams, expansion is not expected to be on the BOG agenda.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said it wasn’t a “front-burner” issue when the Governors met last December.
The Olympic issue, however, is a scorching-hot topic right now.
The men’s tournament is supposed to run Feb. 11-22, and testing of the venue, which is typically done at least a year prior to the beginning of an Olympic event, isn’t expected to be conducted before the end of the second week of January.
That leaves practically no margin for error for the IOC to provide a venue that meets NHL standards in time.
Given how the project has gone so far, confidence that they’ll deliver is on shaky ground.
We’ll see where it’s at after two days of meetings at the Broadmoor wrap.
