The Olympic ice hockey tournament has long been considered the world’s premier sporting event. For the first three decades, teams from Canada dominated men’s competition, winning six of the seven gold medals available from 1920 to 1952. In 1956, the Soviet Union began competing and quickly overtook Canada as the dominant team in the sport. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1992, several of its former states joined together to compete as a Unified Team and won four straight gold medals.
The NHL and its players’ union finally agreed to let NHLers play in the Olympics starting with 1998. Since then, NHL players have made up a large portion of the teams that have played in the Games.
Each Olympic ice hockey game is played with two teams of six players each, on rinks that are much smaller than those used by the NHL. In order to play in the tournament, a country must qualify based on its standing among the best teams in the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) rankings.
From 1924 to 1988, the Olympic tournament started with a round-robin series of games and awarded medals based on points earned during that stage. In 1992, the tournament brought back playoffs and then adjusted that format again in 1998 to better fit the NHL schedule. The current format of five preliminary rounds followed by a final with the top six teams and NHL players has been in place since 2006. If no team wins in regulation, a period of 20 minutes of 5-on-5 sudden-death overtime is added.