2016 World Cup of Hockey: Predicting The Teams

The NHL has announced that the 2016 World Cup of Hockey will be happening. This is huge for several reasons. First of all, it helps to grow the game of hockey and the NHL internationally. Countries like Germany, Slovakia, and Latvia are growing hockey countries, but they just can’t compete with the powerhouses. Secondly, the 2016 World Cup of hockey sounds a bit more fair than the Olympics. Do I want to see Latvia try to take on Sweden, Canada, and Russia? No thanks. 

Each team will have 23 players: 20 skaters and three goalies. The 2016 World Cup will feature eight teams. Canada, United States, Russia, Czech Republic, Sweden, and Finland will each have their own teams. Those are pretty much the six hockey powerhouses. Here’s where it gets interesting. The 2016 World Cup will also feature a “rest of Europe” team that will feature players from European countries other than those European countries mentioned earlier. It will also feature a “Young Stars” team of North American skaters under the age of 23. 23 is the cutoff point, so if Canada wanted to include, say, Connor McDavid, they couldn’t because McDavid wouldn’t be 23 yet.

There are lots of issues that this raises. The biggest one: How does the 2016 World Cup affect the NHL and its involvement in the Olympics? Remember when MLB did something like this and the Olympics disqualified baseball as an Olympic sport? Also, NHL owners have already been pretty out-spoken about not wanting their players who they invest a ton of money in to be participating in the Olympics. The NHL has not commented on the Olympics, so this could get interesting.

Another issue that this brings up involves the “Europe” team. While it would be nice to see more competitive teams, how awkward is it going to be to see players from Slovakia and Germany playing together? How awkward will it be for them? My guess is that it will be pretty awkward.

It’s hard to predict the 2016 World Cup of hockey rosters at this point. I’m going to try and do it anyway. I’ll be assuming that all the players will participate, but I’ll include some reserves in case there are injuries or players refuse to participate. I won’t be doing the Young Stars because it’s too difficult to predict prospects.