Key meeting set Monday for 2024 World Cup of Hockey’s fate

Tick tock. The clock is ticking on the 2024 World Cup of Hockey, with organizers pushing to nail down details on hockey’s first best-on-best tournament in a decade, given that the puck was slated to be dropped in less than 16 months.

To that end, sources tell Daily Faceoff that executives from the NHL, NHL Players’ Association and the International Ice Hockey Federation are scheduled to meet on Monday in Toronto, with all stakeholders in town for Hockey Hall of Fame celebrations.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, deputy commissioner Bill Daly and NHLPA executive director Don Fehr will meet with IIHF president Luc Tardif and general secretary Matti Nurminen, among others, on Monday.

There are numerous items on the agenda for Monday’s meeting, but chief among them is moving the ball further down the field on the World Cup. Yes, there is the elephant in the room of potential Russian-born player participation, but there are also financial elements remaining to be sorted, including revenue splits and expense sharing between the parties.

The IIHF also has key direct commercial relationships with potential tournament partners and it sounds like it would be mutually beneficial for all stakeholders for the sport’s international governing body to be on-board.

However, that is not a necessity. At October’s Board of Governors meeting, Daly said that the NHL does not need the IIHF to sanction the tournament.

“Oh yeah, and they acknowledged that,” Daly said on Oct. 18. “I would say historically, our World Cups and Canada Cups have been done with the individual federations and not really through the IIHF – Although we’ve made them a part of it. Particularly with the new administration of the IIHF, with whom we envision having a broader partnership that is more far-reaching than what we’ve had in certain in recent years, we want to further what we can. But if we can’t, we can’t.”

Then once the dollars and cents are worked out, the NHL, NHLPA and IIHF could begin to make headway on handling the inclusion or exclusion of Russian-born players.

Not having Russia participate in some way, shape, or form if a tournament is played in 2024 would further the drought of true “best-on-best” play, which hasn’t happened since the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

European-based IIHF members have made it abundantly clear to all parties involved that they do not want to see any Russian-born players participating in the tournament since Russia unprovokingly invaded Ukraine last spring. There was an idea broached about having Russian-born players skate on a team under a banner that isn’t the Russian flag, but that did not fly.

“We’ve considered that as an alternative, as a possibility, but based on what I understand to be the concerns, it doesn’t appear as if that is going to be a fix for the other European countries,” Daly said.

“There’s still a lot of work that has to be done before we even get to that issue,” Bettman said on Oct. 18.

And that means the clock is ticking. Because of Russia’s invasion, because of the financial commitments needed, because of the complexity of pulling off an event of this magnitude in a short period of time, all parties involved have acknowledged that it may just not be feasible to play in 2024.

That is a very real possibility now, which would mean the next play on the international calendar for NHL players wouldn’t come until the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy.

“We’re getting close to whatever the deadline is,” Bettman said on Oct. 18. “Whether the date is in a week or a month, we’ve got to be in a position in the foreseeable future to wrap up all of the issues, otherwise it would delay the World Cup.”