NHL Players and Coaches Skip the 2022 Olympics

By Max Fried

The 2022 Olympics was recently held in Beijing, China, and the NHL did not attend due to COVID-19. While the NHL decided to skip the Olympics, it wasn’t originally this way. At first, the NHL officials decided in September 2021 to pause its regular seasons to send players to Beijing for the games. However, this could only happen if the COVID-19 disruptions did not interfere with the Olympics window that the league had set. However, due to players testing positive for COVID’s new strain, Omicron, the NHL had to postpone 50 games. This resulted in the NHL’s decision to forgo the trip to Beijing. The response from the NHL was not instant, but a formal announcement was made after much consideration.

The NHL put out a statement that the 50th game was postponed (Washington Capitals vs. Philadelphia Flyers). The NHL specifically said that the COVID-19 issues with the Capitals were the main prompt for postponing and canceling the NHL attending the Olympics. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said, “Accordingly, we have waited as long as possible to make this decision.” Defenseman for the Tampa Bay Lightning, Victor Hedman said, “It’s not fun to see all these games getting canceled.” Now that the NHL is not going, this will most likely weaken the U.S. and Canada teams. This is because most of the teams are reliant on NHL players, unlike teams like Sweden and Finland, who are expected to do better this year.