USA, Canada take different paths on Olympic practice access

MILAN — The Americans would have liked to close their borders, but didn’t. The Canadians did, then tried to talk their way out of it.

The men’s hockey teams at the 2026 Winter Games are readying for the start of the preliminaries, which begin for the 12-team field on Wednesday, Feb. 11. The U.S. begins its tournament Feb. 12 against Latvia, and Canada plays Czechia on the same day. So far there’s been one practice on Sunday evening, the same day players from both teams arrived on charters from the U.S., and one on Monday.

U.S. coach Mike Sullivan knew that sooner or later, the information would come out, and decided against trying to keep out reporters.

‘We talked about it with our practice today,’ Sullivan said. ‘I think any time as a coach and staff you have an opportunity to spend alone time with your team, we would all prefer that. We also understand that this is to a certain extent a business and part of the access to the group is an important element of it also.

‘But as a coaching staff, we love having alone time with our team and be able to work on things without reading about it in a tweet 30 seconds later or whatever it may be. But we understand that’s the world we live in.’

Canada was on the practice sheet at the Santaguilia, and used that as a reason to essentially claim that practice wasn’t closed, there just weren’t allowed any members of the media to attend.

‘Practice wasn’t closed, it was only done because the rink’s too small,’ Canada coach Jon Cooper said. ‘It’s just distractions and people, there’s just issues to have so many people here.

‘Did anything happen? No, it did not.’

The Americans had an upbeat practice, benefitting from having much of the same roster as competed a year ago at the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament.

‘I think that’s the benefit of having that Four Nations experience is, we tried a few different things at that tournament,’ Sullivan said. ‘Some we liked, some we didn’t.

‘Not that anything is etched in stone because I just think that’s the human element of sports. We’ll see how it goes.’

Tuesday will be a day off for the Americans. That’s the benefit of having a bit of leeway with the schedule because they don’t play until Thursday. It reflects the fact players have played upwards of 50-plus NHL games between early October and early February because the schedule was compressed to account for the Olympics.

‘We built a schedule well before we got here based on how much hockey these guys have played in the NHL to a certain extent and then getting to this point,’ Sullivan said. ‘We’ve built a schedule out on building in days off time, off the ice, things of that nature. What we have moving forward as far as the amount of hockey that we have to play once the games begin. We’ve put together a schedule as a staff two months ago on what this looks like.

‘We may tweak it as we go, but we have a thorough game plan on how we’re going to go about it from the start of the tournament to the end.’