Colorado Avalanche: Significance of No Olympic Participation

Colorado Avalanche players, along with the rest of the NHL, will not be participating in the 2018 Winter Olympics unless they miss NHL games and pay their own way.

Colorado Avalanche players such as Matt Duchene, Gabriel Landeskog and Erik Johnson will be unable to repeat their medal victories at the 2018 Winter Olympics. The NHL just announced that it won’t participate in the Olympics.

The Olympic Games are taking place February 9 to 25, 2017, in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Player Participation in the Winter Olympics

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The players love participating in the Olympic games. Many players, including Auston Matthews and Erik Karlsson, have spoken about their desire to play in the Olympic Games.

At the time of writing, there hadn’t been any response from the NHL Players’ Association. Only one player, goalie Henrik Ludqvist, had weighed in on Twitter anyway:

Disappointing news, @NHL won't be part of the Olympics 2018. A huge opportunity to market the game at the biggest stage is wasted..
— Henrik Lundqvist (@HLundqvist) April 3, 2017

The question arises — will NHL players participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics anyway?

According to ABC News, the NHL had not yet decided if the teams would be allowed to make decisions on a case-by-case basis concerning Olympic participation. In other words, it could be that individual teams will get to decide how to approach players leaving for South Korea.

The International Olympic Committee had already had already stated that it would not be paying for the players’ travel, insurance and accommodations. So, either way players were going to have to foot their own bills.

What’s more, the players would likely lose a portion of their salary for those games they don’t play. However, the monetary issues probably aren’t the most significant considerations.

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Naturally, only the best players get invited to their countries’ national teams. Players such as Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and Carey Price are centerpieces to their NHL teams’ success. If they miss several games so they can go participate in the Olympics, that can be detrimental to their teams’ record.

And heaven forbid one of those players gets hurt. During the 2014 Olympic Games, Jonathan Tavares got injured and was out for the rest of the NHL season. His New York Islanders went from being a bubble team to non-contenders that year.

Additionally, Pyeongchang, South Korea, is also on the other side of the world. If the 2018 Olympic Games were being held somewhere in North America, it might be different. But traveling all those hours to a place practically opposite in clock time (13 hours difference) will be very wearying for players. Again, it’s one thing if the NHL schedule is on hold, but these players would have to enter back into a continuing season.

Not just a continuing season, but the playoff hunt.

Players love to represent their countries — there’s no questioning that. However, let’s be real. The majority of them want to win the Stanley Cup more than Olympic gold — and that takes giving your all to your NHL team.

I’d say there may be some players next year on teams unlikely to make the playoffs who might participate in the Olympic Games. And there may be a few stars who sacrifice their time and money to represent their countries. But there won’t be star-packed Olympic rosters like in previous years.

Fan Reaction to the News

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I hold what I thought was a very unpopular opinion — I don’t mind that NHL players won’t be participating in the Olympics.

I’ve watched previous Olympic years. I even got up at ungodly hours to watch Colorado Avalanche players in the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. What has been my reward? Mostly nothing Avs-related. Matt Duchene even got scratched from some of the games, and none of the Avs players did much.

For my part, I really prefer NHL hockey. I’m not a fan of the bigger international ice nor the antiseptic international rules. And if I want to watch the best players in the world play, I’ll watch NHL games. And I do just that.

I thought the majority of hockey fans felt otherwise. Yet according to an NHL.com poll, 73% of US fans and 53% of Canadian fans stated they were against the break in the NHL season.

Nonetheless, fans on social media were outraged by the news. They want to see the players get to represent their countries in the 2018 Winter Olympics. They think Olympic participation can grow the sport.

I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s not like there won’t be hockey at the Olympics — there just won’t be so many NHLers stacking the deck for certain countries. Maybe small countries like Slovenia, Latvia and Lithuania will get a chance to make a better showing since the Canadian, US, Russian, Czech and Swedish teams won’t be filled with NHL players. The playing field will be more equal.

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It’s hard to say which Colorado Avalanche players would have been invited to Olympic participation anyway because we don’t know who will be on the team next year. Plus, they’ve all had career-low seasons this year.

Of the current cast, I’d say Gabriel Landeskog, Mikko Rantanen, Sven Andrighetto and Semyon Varlamov would get invites. But let’s face it, we’ll probably see Landeskog and Rantanen, as well as Nathan MacKinnon, Matt Duchene, Tyson Barrie and maybe Erik Johnson at IIHF Worlds.

So, for the Colorado Avalanche at least, the NHL’s decision against official participation is unlikely to have a big impact. What’s your opinion on the matter, Avs Nation?

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