Calling the NHL 4 Nations Tournament a "best-on-best" competition is misleading when it excludes elite players from countries like Russia, Czechia, Switzerland, and Germany. Some of the world’s top talents, Leon Draisaitl, Nikita Kucherov, Kirill Kaprizov, and David Pastrňák, are left out, disqualifying it from being a true representation of the best talent in the game.
This tournament has been a massively successful made-for-TV event, replacing the All-Star Game with something more competitive, but it cannot claim to be a legitimate international best-on-best showcase. The NHL structured it in a way that keeps things simple, limiting the number of teams and ensuring all players come from NHL rosters, still, the reality is that international hockey is bigger than just four countries.
To create a real best-on-best tournament outside of the Olympics, they would need to expand the field to include all major hockey nations. The World Cup of Hockey (returning in 2028) will have a broader field, but the execution is fundamentally flawed if they’re still forcing countries with only a handful of elite players to ice full rosters against stacked powerhouses like Canada and the U.S. The issue isn’t just about including all the best players; it’s about making sure the structure actually results in competitive hockey.
Germany, for example, has Draisaitl, Stützle, and Seider; but beyond that, their depth drops off significantly. Even if they include players like Peterka and Grubauer, the rest of the lineup would likely be filled with DEL guys or marginal NHLers. That’s a huge talent gap when you compare them to a Canadian roster that could realistically have 75% of their 23 selections be NHL first-line caliber talents. The same problem applies to Switzerland, Josi, Hischier, and Meier are great, but the supporting cast isn’t anywhere close to the level of their opponents. These teams would be overmatched in almost every game, not because they don’t have talent, but because their elite guys don’t have an equivalent supporting cast like the Big Four do.
Czechia is a little better off, since they can at least field a more NHL-heavy team, but even they would struggle to compete over a full tournament. The problem is that in a true best-on-best format, elite talent is great, but depth is what wins. Germany can send out Draisaitl for 30 minutes a night but in the other half they’ll be rolling out DEL-level players against Canada or the U.S.’s NHL All-Stars, and the mismatch becomes obvious.
Team Europe worked in 2016. Instead of forcing guys like Draisaitl and Josi to drag along subpar rosters, they were surrounded by other elite players from non-traditional hockey countries. It made the games way more competitive and gave elite players a real chance to play meaningful hockey instead of just trying to survive.
The World Cup is technically “solving” the issue of the missing players, but it’s missing the bigger picture. There’s a difference between including elite players and actually making sure the tournament is structured in a way that creates real competition. This 4 Nations was a massive success and the same can be said about the 2028 World Cup as long as some serious moves are made to ensure the maximum amount of true best-on-best hockey. Here are two ideas.
At one point, a North America vs. Europe format was used in the 1979 Challenge Cup, where a team of NHL All-Stars played a three-game series against the Soviet Union. This concept could work well now. Unlike the 4 Nations format, this ensures that every elite NHL player is eligible, regardless of nationality. Historically, Canada and the U.S. have had more depth than Europe as a whole, but in today's NHL, the top European players can absolutely match up. This is probably the simplest way to do it while still capturing the highest level of international hockey.
This naturally opens the door for another possibility that has been long overdue: an exclusive USA vs. Canada showdown. No rivalry in hockey carries the same weight as these two nations going head-to-head. It is the defining battle of the sport, rooted in history, culture, and decades of legendary moments and clearly displayed in this year’s 4 Nations. While the Olympics and past World Cups have provided glimpses of this matchup on the biggest stage, the opportunity to build a full-fledged best-of-three or best-of-five series between these two powerhouses would stand alone as a separate, highly anticipated event.
A secondary suggestion to ensure a best-on-best tournament would be a rework of the 4 Nations. First, replace one of the nations with a “Team Europe,” essentially an all-star squad made up of the best players whose national teams did not make the tournament. Then, after each tournament, the worst-performing of the three invited nations (based on standings or a tiebreaker) would be relegated and swapped with a new nation for the next edition.
In practical terms an example of this could look like Canada, U.S., and Sweden being invited and the remaining top European players forming Team Europe. This solves the biggest issue with the current Four Nations format and by adding relegation, you prevent the tournament from feeling stagnant. Even if a team isn’t in contention for the final, they still have to fight to avoid finishing last and losing their place in the next tournament.
The process could be straightforward. After the round-robin phase, the standings would determine not only which teams advance to the championship game, but also which team is relegated. The lowest-placed national team among the three invited participants would be replaced by the next best-ranked hockey nation based on NHL-selected criteria. Since it’s an NHL tournament, one suggestion would be to incorporate the use of an objective metric like total points scored by NHL players by nationality. This system would reward countries that develop strong talent pipelines while ensuring that no team coasts on reputation alone.
This would also create a fascinating dynamic for Team Europe: since they aren’t a traditional nation, they wouldn’t be subject to relegation, meaning they’d be a constant presence in the tournament. This could turn them into either a dominant force or a perennial underdog, depending on how their roster is structured in a given year. Fans would have a completely new type of team to root for, one that represents global talent rather than a single country and one that, when examined, could absolutely win the tournament year in and year out.
The current 4 Nations setup was a massive step up from the All-Star Game but it falls short of being a legitimate international event because of its exclusionary nature. Adding a “Team Europe” and implementing relegation fixes these issues while maintaining a streamlined, easy-to-follow format. It also adds the kind of unpredictability that makes sports compelling.