The seemingly inevitable is now on the verge of being official: The NHL will not be going to the Beijing Olympics in February. The Athletic reported on Tuesday that the NHL and NHL Players Association have agreed not to go, with an official announcement expected soon. Other reports have confirmed the news.
It’s a completely understandable decision, and there’s really no one to blame other than COVID-19. The latest outbreak that has swept across the NHL over the last couple weeks has torn the league’s schedule to shreds and raised serious concerns about traveling to China in the middle of the season.
Testing positive while in Beijing would put players at risk of being stuck there for weeks while the NHL season resumes. The NHL is now going to need to use February to make up all these postponed games anyways.
This being the right decision does not make it any less disappointing, though. Olympic hockey with NHL players is as good as hockey gets. This will now be two straight Olympics without NHL players, after the league blocked players from going in 2018. For anyone who cares about hockey at all, that sucks.
Players wanted to go. They wanted to go in 2018, too. They were holding out hope that they could make this year work as recently as last week. It was only as COVID cases across the league topped 100 and nearly every team got shut down through Christmas that they reluctantly accepted the inevitable.
Every player who had a chance to represent his country in Beijing is bummed out right now. There are the legends for whom this may have been their last Olympics, like Patrice Bergeron, Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. There are the young superstars for whom this would have been the first, like Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews and, locally, David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy.
I keep thinking about another group, though: the players for whom this may very well have been their only Olympic opportunity. And one of the faces of that group is another Bruins star: Brad Marchand.
Marchand has been one of the very best players in the NHL for half a decade. The only players with more points than him since 2016 are McDavid and Draisaitl. But Marchand has never been to the Olympics, and now he may never get to go.
He was not yet the elite player he is now the last time NHL players went to the Olympics in 2014. He will be 37 when the next Olympics roll around in 2026.
Marchand would have been a lock for Team Canada in 2018, but the NHL didn’t go. He expressed bitter disappointment at the time. He would have been a lock this year, too. Back in September, he said he would “love” to get the opportunity to go and that it would be an “honor” if he did. Now he will once again be left disappointed.
Marchand is obviously not alone in his disappointment. His two Bruins linemates -- Bergeron and Pastrnak -- have each missed out on two surefire Olympic trips as well. But while it probably doesn’t offer much consolation right now, at least Bergeron will always be able to say that he went twice, and won two golds medals. At least Pastrnak, at 25 years old, will have one or two more chances, unless the NHL pulls out of future Olympics as well. The same goes for the 24-year-old McAvoy.
There are other players who are in a similar situation as Marchand, including Lightning stars and two-time Stanley Cup champions Steven Stamkos and Victor Hedman.
To be clear, no one should rule out the possibility of Marchand still being good enough four years from now to make Canada’s 2026 Olympic team. He has gotten better, not worse, in recent years. His career high in points per game came last season. Through 21 games, this season is his second-best mark. But the Canadian Olympic team is widely considered the hardest hockey team in the world to make for good reason, and doing so at age 37 -- a year older than Bergeron is right now -- would be a remarkable accomplishment.
We also shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the entire 2022 Winter Olympics end up getting postponed a year, which could put them back in play for the NHL. That doesn’t seem likely to happen at this very moment, but who knows how these next few weeks play out.
Marchand does have some gold on his shelf. He helped Canada win back-to-back World Junior Championships in 2007 and 2008. He won the World Championship in 2016 and then helped lead Canada to gold at the World Cup of Hockey later that year, dominating on a line with Bergeron and Crosby.
But those tournaments aren’t the Olympics, and those gold medals aren’t quite the same as Olympic gold. And the fact that there’s now a real chance that Marchand will never even get to compete for Olympic gold is a shame.
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