The 4 Nations Faceoff tournament is set for February 2025 and there is the potential to have plenty of Toronto Maple Leafs players take part.
The four nations that will ice teams are; Canada, Finland, Sweden, and USA. These nations are heavily represented on the Toronto Maple Leafs roster, with many players to choose from.
The announcement of this tournament came earlier this year, as well as the announcement that the NHL would participate in both the 2026 and 2030 Winter Olympics.
This tournament will be in lieu of the annual All-star game and seems to be a placeholder for the World Cup of Hockey that is set to return in 2028, with another tournament slated for 2032. These announcements set the stage for a lot of best-on-best international hockey coming up.
It has been over a decade since the NHL has seen true best-on-best international play at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Since then, the closest we have seen is the NHL's World Cup of Hockey in 2016 that saw only eight teams compete. Two of those teams being a "Team North America" for players 23-and-under from North America and a "Team Europe" which was made up of players from other European countries that did not have their own standalone team.
This tournament is the first real taste of international competition in a long time and will certainly be many people's first time seeing best-on-best international games.
Below, I have listed each player I think has a shot at making their respective country's roster in descending order with the last few being some 'darkhorse' candidates.