Jon Cooper hasn’t heard any Olympic chatter from his players.
Canada’s head coach is confident the team’s focus is solely on the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament.
“It has never been mentioned in the room,” Cooper said of the 2026 Games. “It’s never been talked about.”
That might indeed be the case. NHL players, however, are human. And they also know what’s just over the horizon.
The league will return to the global sporting spectacle in 12 months at the Milan-Cortina Olympics in Italy.
The 4 Nations — the United States, Sweden and Finland are also in the field — is the closest thing men’s hockey has come to best-on-best since the 2016 World Cup.
The event that marks NHL players’ return to high-level international hockey is also clearly an Olympic audition.
“I’m sure that this is part of the evaluation process,” Canadian defenceman Josh Morrissey said. “The best thing any …