Toronto Maple Leafs: Why NHL Players Going to Beijing Is Awesome

The Toronto Maple Leafs will be taking a break halfway through the upcoming season.

The NHL is officially sending their players to Beijing to play in the Olympics. Watching Team Canada win gold in 2010 in one of my favorite memories watching hockey, and this roster in 2022, which is going to include Toronto Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner,  looks to be absolutely stacked.

Mitch Marner on the same line as Connor McDavid? Yes please. Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon? That feels like cheating.

There’s simply no comparison to what Team Canada can bring to China next year and what they brought to Korea in 2018.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Canada’s Olympic Team

Anyway, enough gushing about Team Canada. Let’s talk about why this is good not only for the Olympics but hockey in general.

As much as I love the NHL, they’ve made some questionable decisions. As a Gary Bettman apologist, I tend to think he does right by the game, but his decision four years ago to not release NHL players to Korea still makes no sense to me. The benefits of sending players to the Olympics – such as growth of the game, and the excitement it produces –  outweigh the negatives of a two week play stoppage and the risk of injury.

Hockey has a very diverse pool of talent and the NHL has benefitted by having stars from multiple different countries and several players who hail from overseas. We of course have Crosby and McDavid, but Russia has given us players like Ovechkin and Kucherov and Sweden has Hedman and Pettersson.

Name me another sport where so many countries boast players of such high caliber. We might be able to see all of these guys play against each other in just a few short months. There’s no better way to grow the game of hockey, which is what we’re supposed to be trying to do here, than putting good old national pride on the line.

Hopefully by the time the Winter Games come around, we will be out or at least almost out of this pandemic. Speaking of which, that is the one thing that may prevent this from happening altogether. The NHL’s participation in the Olympics is contingent on the pandemic.  If things are getting out of hand, they won’t go.  This may cancel the Olympics completely, so it’s not just hockey.

Should all go well, we may get to see a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Mitch Marner, but potentially also John Tavares and Morgan Rielly) win something important.