The World Cup of Hockey dream is dead for 2021

The NHL has officially put an end to a possible World Cup of Hockey tournament in 2021, but the door remains open for future series later in the decade.

Unfortunately for hockey fans, there will be no Team North America reunion for the foreseeable future. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has put an end to speculation that a World Cup of Hockey will return in either 2020 or 2021, stating to the media during the league’s Board of Governor’s meetings in California that the dream is officially over.

More specifically, that the NHL does not have the time to be able to pull together a tournament of hockey’s best before February 2021.

“We can’t do it this quickly,” Bettman said to the media on Tuesday.

Hockey fans may remember the 2016 World Cup of Hockey that featured an eight-team tournament as the league’s Band-Aid to their lack of participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics. The tournament wasn’t the hit the league thought it would be, but the legend of Team North America — a club made of under-23 players from United States and Canada — remains the tournament’s highlight three years later.

The NHL had scrapped plans for a 2020 tournament in January of this year, but the news that the league and the NHL Players’ Association won’t opt out of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement brought speculation back into the fold.

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly stoked those flames earlier this season in October when he said the league was open to bringing back the tournament in some form over the next few seasons.

That dream, sadly, has ended with Bettman’s statements during the NHL’s Board of Governor’s meetings. However, Bettman did not rule out the possibility that the NHL would bring back the World Cup of Hockey sometime in the future.

“I think we’re all in agreement that bringing back the World Cup on a regular basis would be a good thing and that’s something that we’re having serious discussions with the [NHLPA] on,” Bettman said in a comment to ESPN.

The NHL, according to TSN’s Pierre LeBrun, are looking into setting up two tournaments in 2024 and 2028, giving the league appropriate time to organize a tournament.

A major factor in the NHL’s organization of World Cup of Hockey tournaments is no doubt their participation in the Winter Olympics. The NHL missed out on the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and are still not committed to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. While the league makes no money off of the Olympics — and has to halt their season to participate — hockey players mark the Games as a point of pride in playing for their country of origin.

The World Cup of Hockey was propositioned as the league’s own in-house alternative to the Olympics, a tournament they can control and make money off of, even though the 2016 version didn’t offer much in terms of profits. The Olympics are a larger risk for the NHL to participate in, but without their inclusion in 2018 the men’s game suffered as a result.

Hockey fans became enamored by Team North America in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, but that tournament was likely a one-and-done for that dream team. The NHL likely won’t embrace the weird when it comes to the World Cup of Hockey, though adding elements of it to the upcoming 2021 All-Star Game may soften the blow of having to wait until the mid-2020s for the next hockey tournament.