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It’s safe to say that hockey will be the most watched, and most talked-about, sport at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Italy.
The men’s tournament in particular is going to draw a ton of interest as NHL players return for the first time since 2014, giving Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews and many of the league’s other young superstars their first taste of the Olympics. A Canada-U.S. clash for the gold medal seems to be in the cards after the bordering rivals’ electrifying battles at last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off.
On the women’s side, another extremely competitive, winner-take-all showdown between Canada and the U.S. feels almost inevitable as the archrival superpowers continue to dominate the world.
So, two Canada-U.S. hockey gold-medal games next month? Yes, please! It’s hard to imagine a more exciting outcome than that. But is that the way it will actually play out?
To help gauge the chances, we once again turned to our friends at Shoreview Sports Analytics. Much like they did for our Olympic curling preview last week, the Shoreview guys built a model to predict how each country will do in the men’s and women’s hockey tournaments. And some of the projections are pretty surprising.
Let’s dive in.
Men’s
The most surprising things to me here are Canada’s relatively low gold-medal chances and the fact that Sweden — not the United States — comes out as the Canadians’ top challenger. It’s also a bit unexpected to see the Czech Republic ahead of Finland after the Czechs were left out of the 4 Nations Face-Off.
Mainly, though, I’m struck by how tight everything is. The “favourite,” Canada, is given just a 37 per cent chance of winning gold.
Without (hopefully) getting too deep in the weeds, I think it’s important to lay out the methodology behind these numbers.
As Shoreview’s Mike Heenan explains it, his firm started by building a rating for each team using the Elo system, which measures a team’s strength based on previous game results. Basically, if you beat an opponent you’re expected to beat, your rating goes up a little, and if you upset a stronger foe, your rating goes up a lot. By the same token, when you lose, your rating goes down according to the quality of the team that beat you. It’s a fairly simple way to calculate the likelihood of a team winning a head-to-head matchup happening right now.
In order to establish each team’s Elo rating, Shoreview used all games played in major, senior-level events (so no world juniors) from 2015 to the present. In this case, that’s mostly the annual men’s world championship (which includes NHL players) and the last two Olympics (which did not). This decade-long sample provides a pretty good general idea of how good each country is at men’s hockey.Â
But, as any fan knows, none of those tournaments featured all of the top players from each country. So Shoreview triple-weighted last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off — the only true “best on best” event since the 2014 Olympics, and one featuring largely the same rosters that Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Finland will take to the upcoming Games.
Hockey Canada announces the men’s Olympic hockey team, featuring the return of NHL players to the 2026 Winter Games.
Then, to more fully account for the dramatic increase in player quality at these Olympics relative to the stuff before the 4 Nations, Mike came up with a creative idea. Since hockey does not have a widely accepted and publicly available version of baseball’s Wins Above Replacement stat to calculate a player’s value, he used the player ratings in the popular (and pretty realistic)Â NHL 26Â video game to rank each team’s strength at forward, defence and goaltender and then adjusted their overall Elo rating according to those three positional rankings.
Finally, Shoreview took these adjusted Elo ratings and simulated the tournament 10,000 times.
OK, I did get a bit into the weeds there. But I wanted to make sure everyone knows that a lot of thought went into these projections because they do differ quite a bit from the conventional wisdom.
My general impression is that the vast majority of hockey fans think it’s extremely likely that Canada and the U.S. will meet in the gold-medal game. The betting markets reflect this consensus: one gambling site I checked today had Canada at a little worse than an even-money favourite to win the title (a $100 bet would net you $112 in profit) with the U.S. not too far behind at almost 2/1 odds and then a big gap to Sweden at about 7/1. Finland (11/1), the Czech Republic (16/1) and Switzerland (23/1) followed them.
Personally, I’m more aligned with the betting numbers than Shoreview’s. I believe Canada and the U.S. are the two best teams in the tournament and will play for the gold medal.
But part of the point of walking you through all that methodology was to show that this tournament is very difficult to predict. There just aren’t many highly relevant past results to go on. The cores of the rosters you’ll see in Italy have played together exactly once before, at the 4 Nations Face-Off.
And while that epic Canada-U.S. showdown in the 4 Nations final may seem preordained now, remember that in the round robin Canada required overtime to defeat Sweden, then lost to the U.S., then needed to beat Finland to advance to the final. Canada blew a 4-0 lead to make it a one-goal game in the final minute before Sidney Crosby iced it with an empty-netter. But everyone kind of forgot all that after Canada beat the U.S. with a dramatic McDavid goal in overtime.
The Olympic format also lends itself to upsets. All 12 teams advance to the single-elimination playoffs, with the three group winners and the best second-place team getting a bye to the quarter-finals. Some of those byes could come down to goal differential, which is tough to predict, meaning even a very good team may have to win four straight elimination games to get the gold. And, of course, anything can happen in one game.
Canada is in Group A with the Czechs, Switzerland and France. Group B is Sweden, Finland, Slovakia and host Italy. The U.S. has the softest path to a bye in Group C with Germany, Latvia and Denmark, which is why the Shoreview model puts their silver odds higher than Sweden’s despite the Swedes’ being ahead for gold.
Women’s
If history is any guide, the 10-team women’s tournament is actually two separate events: archrivals Canada and the U.S. will play for the gold medal, while everyone else battles for bronze.
This isn’t a certainty, but it’s pretty close. In the history of women’s international hockey, Canada and the U.S. have met in six of the seven Olympic finals and 23 of the 24 world-title games. The only exceptions came at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, where goalie Kim Martin helped Sweden shock the U.S. in the semifinals before they lost the gold game to Canada; and the 2019 world championship in Finland, where the host team upset Canada in the semis before losing a controversial final to the Americans. Notwithstanding those surprises, there’s been — and there remains — a huge gap between the two superpowers and the rest of the world.
Normally, such a lack of competitive balance would be a huge problem. But the Canadians and Americans have made up for it by giving us some of the most intense, emotional and competitive games in all of hockey. Over the last 10 years, eight of their nine clashes in an Olympic or world-championship final were decided by one goal, including six in overtime or a shootout.
Hockey Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee announce the 23-player roster that will head to Italy for this year’s Winter Games.
So, then, what’s the deal with the Shoreview projections giving the U.S. a better than 3-in-4 chance of beating Canada for the Olympic gold in Milan? Didn’t we just establish that their games are usually decided by one goal? And often go to sudden death? Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a coin flip?
Well, yes. But there appears to have been a shift in the relative quality of these teams of late, and it doesn’t bode well for Canada’s chances of repeating as Olympic champs.
After taking back the world title with a typically hard-fought 4-3 overtime win over Canada last April in the Czech Republic, the United States absolutely dominated the teams’ Rivalry Series this fall, sweeping the four-game tour by a combined score of 24-7.
To illustrate how big an effect this had on the projections, consider that, before the Rivalry Series, the Shoreview model had the gold-medal odds at 53.4 per cent to 45.8 per cent in favour of the United States — close to a toss-up. Now it’s 77.4 per cent to 22.0 per cent.
It’s worth noting here that the Shoreview model for the women’s tournament, unlike the men’s, accounts for blowouts. Because there’s such a big difference in the quality of teams around the world, Mike added a margin of victory factor to the Elo system to reward dominant wins and penalize lopsided losses. For Canada and the U.S., this really helps capture their global dominance, but Canada got dinged this time for the Rivalry Series.
At the same time, we don’t want to overstate the effect those blowouts had on the projections. Mike ran them without the margin of victory factor and the U.S. was still about a 70 per cent favourite for gold.
Unfortunately for Canada, there’s no playing around with roster-level adjustments like there is for the men’s tournament. The players on both sides will be more or less the same at the Olympics as they were for the Rivalry Series. So, the odds are what they are. Canada will just have to find a way to beat them.
