Play to win or experiment for Olympics: What is Canada’s priority at the 4 Nations Face-Off?

Dec 5, 2024

Don Sweeney and Jon Cooper (Imagn Images)

Credit: Imagn Images

Don Sweeney perfectly summarized the joy of building a team for the first men’s best-on-hockey tournament in more than a decade.

“My kids are a little older, but [in the past] they were excited about video games being able to have GM mode and put together their own teams,” he said. “And you get to do that in this case.”

Sweeney, the Boston Bruins’ GM, has been entrusted as Canada’s GM for the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off and assistant GM for the 2026 Canadian Olympic team. Meeting virtually with media Thursday to discuss the Canadian 4 Nations roster, which was announced Wednesday, Sweeney and Canada coach Jon Cooper approached the discussion with a palpable passion. They’re clearly not treating the four-team tournament, which replaces the All-Star Game and goes down Feb. 12-20, 2025, as some throwaway exhibition. If there was any doubt about that: Cooper explained that every member of his coaching staff, each of whom is an active NHL bench boss and thus a direct rival of his Tampa Bay Lightning, was completely open in sharing trade secrets, putting their heads together to discuss their own teams’ systems as they dream up their strategy for February. They want to win this thing.

But what, in particular, matters about the tournament? It’s best on best in that it will feature four countries deploying their best players in Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States. But it won’t be a true test of global hockey supremacy without other top nations such as Russia, Czechia, Germany, Switzerland and more competing. As an exclusively NHL and NHL Players’ Association-run exhibition, It won’t have any bearings on IIHF world rankings, either.

What will have a lot at stake, on the other hand: the 2026 Milan Olympics, which will feature all the top nations vying for gold except possibly Russia.

So does that mean the participating teams view the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off as a mere dry run for Milan, a chance to experiment with lineup combinations and see who jives with whom?

Yes and no. Cooper expects his team to be living in the moment – but also believes some useful Olympic assessment data will be banked.

“I think when that puck drops on the first game of the tournament, it’ll be zero people thinking about the Olympics,” Cooper said. “And everybody will be thinking on our team and about winning the hockey game. It’ll all be about 4 Nations. I don’t think at one time anybody’s going to sit here and say this is a stepping stone for the Olympics.

“Now, when the tournament’s over and we’re all doing our debrief on everything that goes on, I think maybe at that time we’ll sit here and say, this worked, or this didn’t, or we can Monday Morning Quarterback everything that goes on to give ourselves a better chance. Or maybe we’ve won the tournament – and ‘How we can keep it going?’ You take all that information in after the tournament, but we built this team to win the 4 Nations.”

Sweeney echoed some of Cooper’s sentiment but, befitting his GM role, also has more of a bird’s eye view of what the 4 Nations means for Canada. In building the team, he never wanted to lose sight of trying to win in 2025, but it would be naïve for anyone to believe there was no projection toward the push for Olympic gold in 2026.

“We definitely went in with a wider lens for that particular reason to identify players that are going to project out down the road, players that might not necessarily be ready for, I mean, they could play, they’re ready, but they weren’t pushing somebody out of a job that we felt earned it at this point in time, with a singular focus of going to the 4 Nations to win,” Sweeney said. “Selfishly: did we build out a database with all those players? Yeah, we did, because we’re going to have to continue to have those stack up on top of each other year, the next year and a half, and make really hard decisions.”

By “those players,” Sweeney was referring to a few of the young, high-upside snubs who were tabled by media members on the Zoom call, including Chicago Blackhawks center Connor Bedard and New York Rangers right winger Alexis Lafreniere. And that’s what makes the roster construction so interesting. No matter how much the Canada brass and players care about winning the 4 Nations, 0.0 people would prioritize it in their hearts above capturing Olympic gold. Isn’t a relatively low-stakes 4 Nations event therefore the ideal window to experiment and see how the next wave of Canada’s stars would mesh with, and compete against, other elite talents?

Sweeney doesn’t quite see it that way, albeit he admitted Thursday that the Canada brass lobbied for 25, not 23, roster spots, which would’ve allowed for more experimentation. Building for February 2025 was still the priority, and he doesn’t expect the veteran players to easily give up their projected spots for 2025. It doesn’t mean youngsters like Bedard, Lafreniere and Macklin Celebrini are off the radar for 2026 simply because they didn’t make the 2025 team, however. Far from it. We could still see a scenario in which Connor Bedard joins forces with Connor McDavid in Milan.

“Going through the second time around the league now, your second year, there’s some challenges associated with that,” Sweeney said. [Bedard’s] working through that, situations where he gets all the attention possible from the best players that he’s playing against each and every night. He’s living and breathing it right now. And it’s only going to help him continue to build his resume. We’re excited about that.”

Canada, then, isn’t totally shoving the endgame agenda into the bottom of a filing cabinet. They understand that this tournament will determine plenty for who will and won’t make the Olympic team. But they’d also be doing themselves and the fans a disservice by treating the 4 Nations as a means to an end.

“I’m sure [the Olympics are] always on the table, but things can change a lot in a year, right?” said Canada defenseman Alex Pietrangelo of the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday’s call. “But I don’t think it’s really, when you’re [at the 4 Nations], in the back of anybody’s mind. You get in that best-on-best tournament and you’re just playing the best you can. Leading up to it, sure, it can be a conversation. But those things get pushed to the back once you’re playing. You forget about all the outside noise and just go out there and play the game.”

If nothing else, that mentality bodes well for the entertainment value of what we’ll witness in Montreal and Boston a couple months from now. Punches will not be pulled.

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