NHL Working On Restarting World Cup of Hockey As Mid-Season Tournament; Return To Olympics

The NHL has announced plans to dip its toe back into international competition.

Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly revealed that the league is working with the NHLPA to begin a new iteration of the World Cup of Hockey that will alternate with the Olympics.

"So if we do a '25 international tournament, we do the '26 Olympics, the '28 World Cup of Hockey, the '30 Olympics, the '32 World Cup of Hockey, and so on," Daly said, per NHL.com. "That's the goal."

The NHL and NHLPA previously held the World Cup of Hockey in 1996, 2004, and 2016, but that doesn't mean the next iteration will follow a similar format.

"I don't know exactly what form it will take," Daly said. "The goal is to make it an international competition of some sort. It's going to obviously be heavily NHL-centric in terms of the player base, maybe entirely NHL. We'll see what form it takes, but that's something we're working on with the Players' Association."

Team North America celebrates a goal during the last edition of the World Cup of Hockey in 2016. (Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images)

NHL Apparently Willing To Hit Pause Every Other Season

This news means that if everything pans out every other season from the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons would have some kind of break in the middle of the season.

The Olympics are entertaining when the NHLers are involved, so let's hope whatever form the World Cup takes is equally interesting.

Every previous iteration took place between late August and mid-September. That way, it wrapped up before NHL training camps got started.

One of the reasons they didn't like doing the Olympics was because it meant putting the season on hold. Now, they're talking about pressing pause on the regular season, a little bit like the NBA plans to do this season, and doing it every other year.

There's still a lot of planning before anything is set in stone. Daly even acknowledged one major issue: the IIHF's current ban on players from Russia and Belarus.

I'd love to see the World Cup of Hockey come back, but I liked it in late summer. Now, placing it in February could also mean that the All-Star Game becomes an every-other-year fixture too.

We'll have to wait and see what they go with. I feel like the finished product will either be really great, or really terrible.

There's no middle ground.

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