Apr 6, 2017 4 min read

Imagine you have a thriving business, and that your best employees come to you and tell you they want to moonlight at another gig for a couple of weeks or so, a move that would force you to shut down your business during its busy season. We have to imagine that wouldn’t sit very well, and it’s pretty much the situation the National Hockey League finds itself in regarding the Winter Olympics every four years.

The NHL decided Monday enough is enough, and announced it will not be mothballing its operations next February to allow its top players to participate in the PyeongChang games in South Korea. It would have been the sixth games featuring players from the NHL. According to the league, the International Olympic Committee told the NHL that if it isn’t sending its players to the South Korea games, it can forget about the Beijing Olympics in 2022. NHL officials refused to be blackmailed. Good for them.

The league issued a statement that said, in part: “We have previously made clear that while the overwhelming majority of our clubs are adamantly opposed to disrupting the 2017-18 NHL season for purposes of accommodating Olympic participation by some NHL players, we were open to hearing from any of the other parties who might have an interest in the issue (e.g., the IOC, the International Ice Hockey Federation, the National Hockey League Players’ Association, etc.) as to reasons the Board of Governors might be interesting in re-evaluating their strongly held views on the subject. A number of months have now passed, and no meaningful dialogue has materialized.”

The NHL also reportedly tried a little strong-arming of its own, trying to gain concessions from the players union in the next collective bargaining agreement in return for softening its stance on Olympic participation. However, “The NHLPA has now publicly confirmed that it has no interest or intention of engaging in any discussion that might make Olympic participation more attractive to clubs,” the league said.

It would be one thing if allowing the players to participate in the Olympics affected only that two- or three-week period. But it disrupts the entire NHL season, because the league has to fit its 82-game schedule into a smaller number of days. And when that happens, it means less rest between games for players, who are then more likely to be injured, thus hurting their teams and, by extension, the owners of those teams.

The players, of course, are outraged by the league’s decision. NHL players are more down-to-earth than most, but professional athletes are a rather spoiled and entitled bunch. Some of these guys make upward of $10 million a year for their “day jobs.” If they are that committed to playing for national pride for whatever countries they hail from, perhaps they should take a sabbatical for the season and return their seven-figure salaries. We don’t see that happening.

In our view, the NHL has very little to gain from shutting down and packing off its players to South Korea. The players union suggests that Olympic hockey is a huge boost for the league and an opportunity to “grow the game,” but there’s little or no evidence to support that. In fact, the league conducted a poll to gauge fan support for shutting down at midseason to accommodate the Olympics. In the United States, 73 percent of fans were against it. And even in Canada, which would be the favorite to claim a gold medal, 53 percent of those polled opposed the break.

The greatest moment in the history of Olympic hockey, in the opinion of most folks, was the U.S. hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union in 1980 in Lake Placid. And do you know who played on that U.S. team? A bunch of relatively unknown kids. Let’s get back to that.