The NHL is rolling east – Newspaper Kommersant No. 156 (7357) of 08.26.

The National Hockey League (NHL), together with the players’ union (NHLPA), intends to resume the prestigious commercial tournament – the World Cup. The competition is scheduled to be held in February 2024 on two continents at once – in North America and Europe. Ten strongest national teams will take part there, which, unlike the last two winter Olympics, will strengthen the main stars of the NHL. The question of whether the Russian team will be included in the number of participating teams remains, however, still unanswered.

One of Thursday’s top sports news was the news that the NHL preparing to revive Hockey World Cup is a commercial super tournament with the participation of the strongest teams. The league, which intends to carve out more than two weeks for the tournament, plans to hold it in February 2024 on the territory of two continents – North America and Europe.

In fact, this is a rather old championship, which was organized by the league back in the 1970s, but then had a different name – the Canada Cup. The draw of the World Cup, which in terms of prestige is often put on a par with the Olympic hockey tournament or the world championship, was held only three times, and with huge pauses. First in 1996then in 2004, and then – more than ten years later – only in 2016. Time after time, the format of the competition underwent significant changes: the regulations, the list of participants changed (in 2004, for example, the combined European team and the youth North American team competed along with the national teams), the rules.

Now the tournament is waiting for another transformation.

The 2024 World Cup will, according to the NHL, include, unlike all previous ones, a qualifying round. The number of participants will grow accordingly: from eight teams, as it was before, to ten.

The deputy head of the NHL, Bill Daly, noted that the teams of hockey powers are guaranteed to be included in this list: it is clear that we are talking primarily about the teams of the USA, Canada, Finland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and, possibly, the teams of Slovakia and Germany.

Whether the Russian team will be among the participants is a big question, on which, Bill Daly snapped, “there is still uncertainty.” Naturally, he once again repeated that the NHL’s position on the Russian-Ukrainian crisis remains unchanged and coincides with the position of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), that the league has no business relations with Russia at the moment, and so on. However, there is a chance that the leadership of the NHL will still decide to allow domestic players to the World Cup.

The NHL, contrary to the isolation trend set by the International Olympic Committee in March of this year, did not then abandon Russian players, whose number reached fifty last season. This was explained very simply: without Russian superstars like Alexander Ovechkin, Artemy Panarin, Evgeny Malkin, Kirill Kaprizov, Nikita Kucherov, Igor Shesterkin, Andrey Vasilevsky, Sergey Bobrovsky and others, the championship would have lost a lot of entertainment, which would subsequently lead to financial losses. And to imagine the NHL without these players is as difficult as it is difficult to imagine the World Cup without the participation of one of the strongest teams.

Ekaterina Remizova