NHL, players association to meet with IIHF, Olympic Committee

After missing both the 2018 and the 2022 Olympic games, NHL players are one step closer to competing in an international best-on-best tournament.

Reporting on the Saturday Headlines segment of Hockey Night in Canada, Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman said that the NHL, the players association, the IIHF and the International Olympic Committee are meeting this upcoming week to discuss player involvement.

"I doubt you'd see a deal this week, I think, talking to everybody involved it would be a surprise," Friedman said. "The one thing that I think has absolutely happened here is if Gary Bettman's goal at the Board of Governors [meeting] was to shame everybody there into getting the construction going a lot faster, it worked."

Bettman and his deputy commissioner Bill Daly expressed their desire to get a schedule of international best-on-best tournaments up and running, ideally beginning with a scaled-back international in-season tournament in 2025, then alternating between the Olympic Games and the World Cup of Hockey every second year.

"The ultimate goal is to have Olympics, two years later World Cup, two years later Olympics, two years later World Cup," Bettman said at the meetings. "That's the cycle we're trying to get on, but we figured we'd try a bit of an appetizer between now and then."

Though Friedman doesn't expect a deal for player participation to be agreed upon this week, he did report that Bettman's talk of the return of a best-on-best international tournament at the Board of Governors meetings did get the ball rolling on this upcoming meeting.

There was an agreement in place to send NHLers to Beijing for the 2022 Olympics, but the COVID-19 pandemic posed too much of an inconvenience to the regular-season schedule, forcing the NHL to exercise its opt-out clause.

The parties involved will likely need to agree upon travel costs, insurance costs and expenses for players and their guests — all of which they were able to accomplish in 2022.