THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
“It was kind of a perfect storm for our sport,” said Canada’s captain Nathan MacKinnon. The sport was ice hockey, and “it” was the National Hockey League’s 4 Nations Face-Off, or more specifically the face-offs between two of the four nations, Canada and the USA.
Actually, MacKinnon might have been playing it down. It was more a perfect shit-storm, a confluence of national sporting rivalry with the political provocations of America’s shit-stirrer in chief, Donald Trump. In the first month of his presidency, Trump had announced whopping tariffs on our neighbors to the north, accusing Canada of being a major source of drug trafficking into the US. He also decided to claim Canada as America’s “51st state”, and mock continuously the Canadian Prime Minister as “Governor Trudeau”. (That Canada already has a Governor General was something of which Trump seemed unaware.)
The perfect storm built up to the point where, before the US and Canada met in their round-robin match at Montreal’s Bell Centre, Canadian fans, who in past years have been quick to happily sing the Star Spangled Banner at NHL games when the public address system malfunctioned (how many Americans ever know the words to O Canada?) were now booing loudly when the US anthem was played.
Then the American team turned the opening face off into something closer to the tournament's French translation: Confrontation des 4 Nations. When the puck was dropped, the US’s Tkachuk brothers, Brady (who plays for Ottawa Senators in the NHL) and Matthew grabbed their Canadian counterparts and started punching. It was like the movie Slap Shot’s Hanson Brothers (who are actually the Carlson brothers, but no relation, sadly). No sooner had those battles been sorted out, another American, JT Miller, started another one. That was three fights in the first nine seconds of the match.
“We wanted to show how united we were and how proud we were to be Americans,' Matthew said. “We knew it was gonna be an intense game and me, Brady, and Millsy were talking before ... about potentially if there were gonna be some scraps, doing it right away.” They had actually told the Canadians they lined up against what they were going to do, laying the challenge down, as it were. “It made me very proud to see how united our team was in a hostile environment,” he added.
The US triumphed in the match, 3-1, but the fights turned the tournament into a talking point worldwide, which turned into a boon for the NHL. The 4 Nations Face-Off was looking to liven up the league's midseason break. Its lackluster All-Star game and skills contests had already been proven uninspiring. At the same time, the NBA had its even-more-show-business Slam Dunk Contest “skills” show – in which otherwise insignificant player Matt McClung won his third-straight victory by doing an Evel Knievel imitation over a car – and its totally defense-free All-Star game.
The 4 Nations, grouping NHL players into teams representing their national status, created a week of games that were not only competitive, but intensely so. The other two nations were Sweden and Finland, whose hockey rivalry is if anything more intense than the US and Canada. The Finns see themselves as the plucky smaller country battling their former occupier; think Scotland vs England at any sport. Obviously, there may have been a few players from Sweden or Finland playing at home who might have been in a full strength national squad, but basically both countries were able to field their best. In the International Ice Hockey Federation’s rankings, Canada is first, followed by Finland, Russia, USA, Germany and Sweden. Because the IIHF currently bans Russia from international competition (which is likely to carry over to the 2026 Olympics) and there are not enough Germans in the NHL to make a full team, the Face-Off gave audiences four of the world’s top six, with two stirring national rivalries making every game important.
Each team played three round robin matches, with the top two meeting in the final. In the first four matches played in Montreal, the US beat Finland 6-1 before defeating Canada, while Canada and Finland both beat Sweden 4-3 in overtime. They moved to Boston for the third: Canada needed a win over Finland to make the final, which they got by a 5-3 margin, which made the US-Sweden match irrelevant; the Swedes won 2-1.
That set up a USA-Canada final. After the first game I'd been asked by BBC for an explanation of the mayhem. At the end I said I was confident Canada would get to the final against the US and then they would win. Why? Because here the sporting reality did not match the geopolitical one. Because on the ice, it was not Canada who were plucky underdogs to their suddenly threatening neighbor to the south. The Canadians were the dominant country.
Hockey is one of Canada’s two national sports. For years everyone thought lacrosse was Canada’s national game, but it turned out nothing official made it so. In 1964 legislation was proposed to declare ice hockey the national sport but it took thirty years before parliament finally reached a compromise: hockey is Canada’s official winter sport; lacrosse its official summer sport. By the way, the only countries ever to win the men’s lacrosse world championships are, of course, the USA and Canada; the US leads that count 11-3.
In hockey the US’s population advantage disappears. For many years hockey was mostly confined to a small number of northern states: New England, primarily the Boston area, along with Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota and especially Minnesota. These were the places where, as in Canada, ponds froze in winter and ice rinks could be built outdoors in small towns and schools. Canada dominated international hockey, winning six of the first seven Winter Olympics gold medals; in 1936 at St Moritz the British winners were made up of dual-passport Canadians. Canada sent amateur teams to the Olympics intact; the 1948 St Moritz gold was won by the Ottawa RCAF Flyers. The teams that played in the IIHF World Championships were usually the Allan Cup champions of Senior hockey, but the top senior leagues were basically semi-pro. In 1952 Canada won the gold with the Edmonton Mercurys, from a lower level senior league, reinforced by other players from its league. But by 1956 the Soviet Union’s development of its own hockey program had advanced far enough to gold at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy; their players, of course, were full-time “shamateur” state employees. The US team took silver in Cortina, while Canada won bronze with the Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen from the Ontario Hockey League. When the US shocked the world by winning gold in 1960 at Squaw Valley, they again beat the Dutchmen who were captained by future Boston Bruins’ coach and GM Harry Sinden and included future Montreal Canadien Bobby Rousseau “on loan” from the Junior Canadiens. The US team included two pairs of brothers: Bill and Bob Cleary from Boston (and Harvard) and Bill and Roger Christian from Warroad, Minnesota (whose brother Gordon had played on the '56 US team).
In those days, there were six teams in the NHL, two of them in Canada. In the Fifties and into the Sixties, rosters varied from 15-17 players, meaning there were between 90-102 jobs for the best hockey players, and virtually all those jobs went to Canadians, almost all of whom had played Junior A hockey before turning pro. It was a small club where everyone knew each other and knew Canadian hockey was the best in the world. The star of the Squaw Valley games had been US goalie Jack McCartan, whose gold medal completed an unusual double since he won a bronze medal in baseball at the 1959 Pan American games. McCartan signed with the New York Rangers, but had a brief NHL career followed by a long career in the minors (and a few years in the upstart WHA, which we will get to). A forward, Tom Williams, had an eight year career with the Boston Bruins, during all of which time he was the only American in the NHL.
In the late Sixties, a few things happened to change the face of hockey. The first was expansion. The NHL doubled in size from six to 12 teams; then the upstart World Hockey Association started play in 1972. The need for players intensified as talent was diluted. The WHA paid big for NHL stars like Bobby Hull, and later for Gordie Howe, who came out of retirement to play with his sons Mark and Marty, but they were more open to non-Canadians to fill their rosters. The New England Whalers, with ex-Bruin Ted Green as captain, were coached by former Boston University coach Jack Kelly. They signed Tom Williams, Larry Pleau, a centre who'd gone from high school in Massachusetts to the Montreal Junior Canadiens and Boston College star Tim Sheehy, who'd won a silver medal at the 1972 Olympics where one of his teammates was Mark Howe, born in Detroit when his dad played for the Red Wings. Later Winnipeg would sign the Swedes Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg to team with Hull on the WHA's best line; Czech star Václav Nedomanský would defect, and Toronto would bring Swedish defenseman Börje Salming to become one of the NHL's best.
1972 saw the Summit Series, eight games between the Soviets and an NHL all-star team, the first four held in Canada and the rest in the USSR. Canadians expected a rout; I remember hearing Canadian announcer Howie Meeker explaining how the Russians would be lucky to win even one game. In the first game at the Montreal Forum, Canada (coached by Harry Sinden) jumped out to a 2-0 lead, the Russians tied it 2-2 in the first period, and won 7-3. The series went down to game eight in Moscow, where through sheer force of will Phil Esposito took the game over in the final period, and Paul Henderson got the winning goal to give the series to Canada 4-3 with one tie. Four years later, the first Canada Cup saw the leading hockey countries send their best players, and the NHL's tournament far outshone the Olympics.
Then in 1980 the US Olympians beat the Soviets and won the gold medal at Lake Placid. That team of mostly college players were better than people still think: defensemen Mike Ramsey, Jack O'Callahan and Ken Morrow had long NHL careers, as did forwards Mark Johnson, Neal Broten and Dave Christian (son and nephew of the '56 and '60 Christians), a centre who'd played defense in Lake Placid. The win caused an explosion of youth hockey in the USA; although Canadian players like Montreal goalie Ken Dryden had gone to US colleges rather than Canadian junior hockey, the American schools became a legitimate developmental path, especially as the game grew in popularity.
As the NHL continued to expand, their appetite for players did so too, and their money was enough to drain the best players from the rest of the world. Now NHL teams draft 18 year olds from Russia, Finland, Sweden and lesser hockey countries. The shrinking hockey world meant even in the 4 Nations you had anomalies like Sweden's William Nylander, born in Calgary where his dad Michael was playing for the Flames.
This homogenization of talent has paradoxically increased the intensity of games when the players revert to their own national identities. And for the Americans, that identity reflects their second-class status which has persisted for a century. Before the tournament started, Canadians were keen on pointing out that since 1976's Canada Cup, and the leveling of the ice by the Zamboni of money, Canada's record against the US stood at 14-5-1, and they had beaten the US in the finals of the '91 Canada Cup, '99 World Cup, '02 Olympics and in overtime at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver on Sidney Crosby's overtime goal: Crosby was still playing for Canada 15 years later.
The final went off as I'd predicted. First, there was some booing of O Canada by the American crowd, but a good portion of the crowd refrained, as if embarrassed. Canadian singer Chantal Kreviazuk, from Ukrainian stock, changed a line of O Canada from “in all of us command” to “that only us command” to cheers from her countrymen in the crowd.
Second, there was only one penalty the entire match, as if neither team wanted to risk the match up of skills to penalties and power plays. Though in fairness, Canada dodged a very obvious whistle for too many men on the ice; their line changes were sloppy throughout. MacKinnon scored first for Canada; Brady Tkachuk and his Ottawa teammate Jake Sanderson made it 2-1 at the end of the first period. Sam Bennett tied the game in the second period, and the third was scoreless. In overtime, Canada's goalie, Jordan Binnington, made three spectacular saves in the first three minutes to prevent a USA win. The player generally thought to be the best in the world, Connor McDavid, was then left alone in the slot in front of the US goal and, as Crosby had done in 2010, scored the winner.
The game was the highest-rated on US television since 1973, with 9.3 million viewers. The biggest audience ever was Game 7 of the Chicago-Montreal Stanley Cup in 1971, with 12.4 million (including me) watching the Canadiens win. In Canada, 5.7 million saw the game, proportionately a bigger viewership than in the US. It was a huge win for the NHL, but the 4 Nations challenge may not return soon: the league will release its players to Olympic play during the season break in both 2026 and 2030, and will host a return of the World Cup in 2028 and 32.
But the real loser was Donald Trump. Having loudly backed the Kansas City Chiefs in their Super Bowl loss to Philadelphia, whose Eagles rejected a visit to his White House, Trump had doubled down backing the USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off. After the match, Canadians were calling for the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of Canada, and joked about adding free healthcare in the “11th province”. Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretsky, who now lives in Hollywood but was honorary captain of the Canadian team, was caught giving US players a thumbs-up; Trump tried to negate criticism of him by seeming to suggest he would be a better Quisling-style ruler of his homeland than “Governor” Trudeau. But it was Trudeau who had the last word to Trump, saying “you can't take our country, and you can't take our game!”
