Why the Four Nations Face-off was a runaway success for hockey

When Connor McDavid’s shot hit the back of the net to end Thursday’s showdown between the USA and Canada, he sent an entire nation into delirium and put an end to the most thrilling week of hockey in many, many years.

Not too bad an alternative to an All-Star Game, eh?

The Four Nations Face-off among Canada, United States, Sweden and Finland had multiple aims for the NHL: Spike TV ratings, spark interest in next year’s Winter Olympics, create a marquee event in the middle of a slow period of the sports calendar, and bring new eyes to the fastest game on ice.

The early returns suggest it was a bigger success than the league and players could have possibly hoped for, though there are real questions whether we’ll ever see such a tournament happen again.

The ratings for Thursday’s final aren’t in yet, but, according to the NHL, the round-robin rounds proved to be a boon for viewership. The league reported an average of 4.6 million viewers watched the six round-robin games across North America, a 226% increase on the last comparable competition when NHL players participated in an international tournament (the 2016 World Cup).

The USA-Canada game on Saturday averaged more than 10 million viewers across North America, more than any non-Stanley Cup Final game since 2014.

For a sport that once held a much larger space in the American sporting landscape, it was a return to prominence after multiple lockouts helped send the TV viewership numbers in the US into decline. The fact that NHL players did not play in the 2018 or 2022 Winter Olympics also helped add to a loss of familiarity with the game for viewers who might only tune in for the biggest moments.

With the league set to send its best to Milan next year, the Four Nations Face-off served as a sort of appetizer for that tournament, a preview of what’s to come when the top players in the world put on their country’s uniforms in the Olympics. It was scintillating and so far-removed from the usual middling effort that comes during normal All-Star games.

The games between the US and Canada were full of fireworks, from the three fights in the first nine seconds of Saturday’s showdown in Montreal all the way to Canada’s Jordan Binnington standing on his head in overtime of Thursday’s final. It seemed only fitting that McDavid – the game’s preeminent young talent and the heir apparent to Sidney Crosby’s title of greatest hockey player in the game right now – was the one to end things when he sent a wrist shot flying past American goalie Connor Hellebuyck nearly halfway through the overtime period.

The four-games-in-one-week tournament meant as much to the players as it did the fans, and the fatigue was evident. As the tense final rolled on Thursday night, both teams looked like they were skating in mud such was the level to which they had exerted themselves. Some players toughed it out through injury and illness to play on in the final, and multiple players said it was akin to playing in a Stanley Cup Final game – and, in some cases, exceeded that level of excitement.

“It’s been absolutely incredible the impact this tournament and that this team’s had on the whole country, and I don’t think people really realize it yet,” said Matthew Tkachuk, the Florida Panthers star who played for Team USA, to Canadian network Sportsnet before the game.

He added, “I can tell you that every single person I’ve talked to is so jacked up for this game. This is an opportunity of a lifetime for us, and I’ve played in some really big games, and this is the biggest one.”

To put that in perspective: Tkachuk is not even a year removed from winning the Stanley Cup in a Game 7, winner-take-all showdown against the Edmonton Oilers. A pretty bold statement to make about a first-time tournament, but Tkachuk’s sentiments were a strong indication of how quickly the Four Nations Face-off took off in importance for the players involved.

It didn’t hurt the tournament’s importance that the usual friendly USA-Canada rivalry has taken on a bit more edge in recent weeks thanks to President Donald Trump.

Trump’s repeated statements about Canada becoming the USA’s 51st state have annoyed, if not offended, many Canadians – not entirely surprising given the promise to “stand on guard for thee” that ends “O Canada.” The frequent threats of massive tariffs that would severely harm Canada’s economy, plus the rivalry between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump, all combined into a toxic stew that saw “The Star-Spangled Banner” booed in Canadian arenas throughout the last several weeks, including in Montreal before Saturday’s matchup.

That annoyance showed itself in Trudeau’s not-even-veiled shot at Trump celebrating the overtime winner on Thursday, in which he said, “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.”

In hockey, a little spice makes everything nice. It’s the combination of grit and glamour that makes it a special sport. For every spectacular show of skill, there’s a big hit or a fight that brings people to their feet and makes them roar their approval. The USA-Canada rivalry is intense when the country’s governments are at their most collegial. When things aren’t that collegial, sports are often the healthiest way for two nations to blow off some steam – and that seemed to be the case Thursday as boos of the Canadian anthem turned into a joint singalong for much of the TD Garden crowd in Boston.

The question that now looms over the NHL is whether to do this tournament again in the near future.

Next year, the 2025-26 season will be interrupted for the Winter Olympics and the full-blown buffet of international hockey that it brings. In past years, that Olympic break has replaced the All-Star Game on the NHL calendar.

But looking forward to 2027, it’s hard to imagine the NHL going back to the usual All-Star Game format. Fewer than 1.4 million people watched the NHL All-Star Game in 2024 and there was no hype, let alone no follow-up conversation, on the game and what it meant for the sport. At the same time, no players got hurt and missed games for their teams when the season resumed, something that can’t be said about the Four Nations Face-off.

If this was the first and only – at least for now – edition of the midseason international tournament, it will go down as a massive overachievement for both the NHL and hockey writ large. The NHL has some time to figure out whether it wants to lean into that success in the coming years and make the Four Nations Face-off a permanent part of the sporting calendar.

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