The NHL players said they wanted to go to the Olympics and so they shall. After sitting out in 2018, the NHL, NHLPA, and IOC came to an agreement yesterday to send players to the next Winter Olympics, which happen in February 2022.
According to the source working in the BOC, there will be 3 chatters taking all the NHL Olympians from US to Beijing. Two of them are on Feb 3rd, and there will be first time ever that NHL players could participate in the @Beijing2022 opening ceremony. @FriedgeHNIC @KevinWeekes pic.twitter.com/d1IzTA94J9
— Longmou Li (@lilongmou) September 3, 2021
Safe assumptions to participate would be Auston Matthews for USA, William Nylander for Sweden, and Mitch Marner for Canada. Beyond that, I suppose Morgan Rielly has an outside chance of going, but that could depend on at least one other potential Canadian defenseman being injured and not available.
I have no idea how deep the Czech Republic team goes, so whether any or all of David Kampf, Ondrej Kase, and Petr Mrazek could be on their team I will leave to our experts below in the comment section (also—wow the Leafs really loaded up on guys from Czechia all of the sudden.)
And if I left out someone obvious, I don’t care. I did less than one minute of research on this as I am sure between now and February there will be so many roster lists and so many debates from so many people that no one will not be totally sick of discussing it by October.
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It’s a long weekend! Enjoy it! Hockey news can wait until Tuesday.
