The NHL’s relationship with its players playing on the international stage is… convoluted at best.

The league didn’t send any of its players until the 1998 Olympics, forming a relationship with the international hockey community that ran unabated for two decades. The Czech Republic would take the Gold Medal that year, and one has to wonder if Canada’s poor roster selection played a part in getting bumped in the semi-finals.

General manager Bobby Clarke named Eric Lindros, the captain of his Philadelphia Flyers, captain over the likes of Wayne Gretzky and others, while the likes of Mark Messier, Adam Oates, Ron Francis, Doug Gilmour and Scott Niedermayer were left off it.

Canada would learn their lesson in 2002, bringing forth a team that would shake off a slow start to win the country’s seventh Olympic Gold medal in men’s ice hockey. The defending champs would struggle to repeat in 2006, dropping two stage games before losing to Russia in the quarter-finals, which once again, only would light a fire under them, securing Gold Medals in 2010 and 2014 that are etched into hockey lore.

But that’s when things started to change. The NHL didn’t send their players to South Korea in 2018 after disputes rose between them and the International Olympic Committee, citing league owners who felt a 17-day break in the schedule in February — while the NFL season had ended and MLB’s season had yet to kick off — wasn’t warranted. Other issues, such as the IOC refusing to pay costs including travel, insurance and accommodations, played into things, too.

Four years later, scheduling conflicts — amid a litany of other issues with the global COVID-19 pandemic — pulled the NHL from the 2022 Games in China. The appetite for Olympic participation never wavered among players or fans of the sport. As such, best-on-best hockey on an international stage has always produced incredible drama.

Fast forward to the upcoming 2026 Olympic Games in Italy. The league got well ahead of things, announcing in early 2024 that an agreement was reached to send players to the Olympic Games not just in 2026, but in 2030, too.

Great news, right? Surely there’s nothing that could come up that would change the NHL’s mind… right?

While things since said announcement have seemingly been smooth, generating more than enough conversation in hockey circles about who should — and shouldn’t — make respective rosters, a dormant volcano has quietly been rumbling.

And it all has to do with the rink in which games are set to be played.

A report from The Athletic surfaced Tuesday, stating that the rink being built in Milan will see its dimensions roughly three feet shorter than those of an NHL rink. How it came to be still isn’t known, but what The Athletic’s report made clear is that an agreement between the league, the IOC and the IIHF “called for hockey to be played on a surface completed to the specifications used in NHL buildings,” and that a shorter rink was news to NHL and NHLPA officials.

There are also concerns about delays in the building of the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, as it’s officially called, with The Associated Press reporting it will go “right down to the wire” to be completed on time. Construction delays aren’t anything new at the Olympics, as it seems that every year there’s some building, or buildings, that aren’t on track to be ready on time, yet 11th-hour work gets completed, and then suddenly, the concerns are a thing of the past.

What adds to the concern about the rink itself, though, is that coaches for both the Canadian and American teams heading to Italy have been outspoken about the size concerns.

Team USA head coach Mike Sullivan seemed none-too-thrilled, saying he hopes “that’s not the case,” and that “the NHL rink is too small as it is,” according to the New York Post’s Mollie Walker.

Canadian assistant coach Pete DeBoer doesn’t seem as concerned, but said, “I don’t understand how that happened.”

Players, thankfully, don’t seem as concerned.

NHL officials still seem to be in the information collection stage of understanding what’s gone wrong, with some who visited Milan last month expressing concern about the lack of progress in the building’s construction. There’s no backup plan if things falter with the arena, either.

As the NHL did for the Nashville Predators and Pittsburgh Penguins’ international game at Avicii Arena in Stockholm, Sweden, last month, there could be an adjustment to the zone sizes. For that game, the league kept the offensive zones with the same dimensions, instead of adjusting the neutral zone.

Call me jaded, call me scornful, call me concerned, but doesn’t this feel like something the league could make a mountain out of a molehill about?

The league and its owners are self-serving — understandable to a point — and I can already see them arguing in favour of keeping their players home, re-doing the NHL’s schedule on the fly, and capitalizing on a time where the league’s only competition is the NBA.

But we’ve been robbed of a decade of true best-on-best hockey, and there’s no denying the larger appetite for February’s Games. The 4 Nations Face-Off was a nice little treat as we finally got to see Connor McDavid wear Team Canada’s jersey in a “best-on-best”, but that tournament was more gimmick, more warm-up, than anything else.

Until we actually see NHLers in Italy, I’ll be skeptical about the league doing anything besides pulling the rug.

Zach Laing is Oilersnation’s associate editor, senior columnist, and The Nation Network’s news director. He also makes up one-half of the Daily Faceoff DFS Hockey Report. He can be followed on X at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach.laing@bettercollective.com.

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