Hockey is a game of controlled failure. You skate hard, you bleed on expensive ice, and most of the time, you go home with nothing but a lingering case of chronic back pain and a mortgage-sized bill for custom-molded carbon fiber skates. But every four years—well, every four years when the NHL isn’t busy arguing with the IOC over who gets to keep the vending machine revenue—somebody gets a medal.

Edmonton is a city that treats hockey like a civic religion, yet its relationship with the Winter Olympics is a bit like a legacy software update that won't quite install. The talent is there. The hardware? That’s a trickier bit of code.

Let’s look at the ledger.

The glory days of the 2002 Salt Lake City games are the high-water mark for the copper and blue. That was back when Ryan Smyth—a man whose face appeared to be constructed entirely of scar tissue and noble intentions—joined Eric Brewer to help Canada snap a fifty-year drought. They brought home gold. Smyth was the human embodiment of a "grind" setting on a high-end burr grinder. He didn’t just play; he existed in a state of perpetual collision. It was the last time the Olympic tournament felt like something pure before the insurance premiums and broadcast rights turned the whole thing into a boardroom hostage situation.

Then there’s Ales Hemsky. In 2006, he snagged a bronze with the Czech Republic. Hemsky played hockey like he was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while falling down a flight of stairs. It was beautiful, twitchy, and occasionally brilliant. But bronze in Turin feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like a relic from an era before we tracked every player’s "expected goals" and "high-danger chances" with the cold, unfeeling precision of a high-frequency trading algorithm.

The list is notably thin for a franchise that has historically hoarded generational talent. Why? Because the NHL’s relationship with the Olympics is the ultimate "it’s complicated" relationship status.

Gary Bettman looks at the Olympics and sees a bug, not a feature. He sees $15 million insurance policies for star players. He sees the risk of a McDavid or a Draisaitl blowing an ACL on a Tuesday in Milan while the NHL’s domestic TV ratings sit in a cryogenic freezer. So, he shuts it down. He pulls the plug. The 2018 and 2022 games were a total blackout for NHL talent, which means we’ve been robbed of the only data set that actually matters: Leon Draisaitl feeding cross-seam passes to a streaking Connor McDavid while wearing the weight of their respective nations.

It’s a specific kind of friction. On one side, you have the players, who would probably play on a frozen pond in Siberia for a chance at a gold medal. On the other, you have the owners, who view the players as depreciating assets that shouldn't be operated outside of sanctioned, profit-generating environments.

We missed out on seeing if Connor McDavid could break the Olympic record for most defenders turned into statues in a single period. Instead, we got a 2022 tournament that looked like a high-level beer league game with better jerseys. The "Every Oilers Player" list should be a scrolling wall of text by now. Instead, it’s a short, dusty shelf.

You’ve got Chris Pronger, who won gold in 2010, but the Edmonton faithful still view him through a lens of bitter, jilted-lover resentment because of his trade request. Does a medal count if the player who won it left your city in a cloud of mystery and expensive litigation? In the cold calculus of fandom, maybe not.

The current roster is a collection of "what-ifs." Draisaitl is arguably the best German player to ever lace them up, yet he has as many Olympic medals as you do. McDavid is the most gifted hockey-playing machine ever built, yet his international trophy case is essentially a 404 error page.

We’re told the NHL will return for 2026. We’re told the logistics are being "optimized." But in a league that prioritizes the bottom line over the spectacle, nothing is certain until the puck actually drops in Italy.

The trade-off is simple: we trade the health of the league's most valuable assets for a two-week dopamine hit of nationalistic fervor. To the owners, it’s a bad deal. To the fans, it’s the only thing that justifies the $18 beers and the $300 jerseys.

Is a piece of polished metal worth the risk of a $100 million contract ending in a heap of shredded ligaments at 3:00 AM Eastern Standard Time?

Probably. But I’m not the one paying the insurance premium.