The NHL appreciates the effort IIHF president Rene Fasel is making to get the best hockey players in the world to the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
But that doesn’t mean the league is going to open its wallet to help him out.
“Rene is a friend of hockey and a champion for the sport,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly wrote in an email to Postmedia, “and I know he is working hard to do whatever he can to offer us a realistic and reasonable opportunity to participate on terms consistent with our past Olympics Games.”
It’s a tough task that Fasel’s taken on, now that the IOC has decided not to cover millions of dollars in transportation and insurance costs for the players. Fasel is not particularly optimistic about his chances of covering the shortfall, meaning there could be no NHL participation in the Olympics for the first time since 1994.
Fasel has said his plan is to go “do some begging” from the national Olympic committees of the hockey-playing countries, but as of right now he says, it “doesn’t look very good.”
“We have to find ways to bring the money together,” he told Postmedia. “It’s not easy, but hopefully we will make it.”