Once a Mismatch, the U.S. and Canada Finally Meet as Hockey Equals
The Canadians and Americans have played in plenty of big games before — but never anything quite like Thursday's 4 Nations Face-Off final.
If Thursday’s championship game of the 4 Nations Face-Off isn’t the biggest game in the history of the United States-Canada hockey rivalry, it’s damn sure close. At a moment when tensions between the two nations are (IMO needlessly) high off the ice… when three fights break out between the teams in the first 9 seconds of their initial matchup… when the Americans have the opportunity to beat the Canadians for the first time in a best-on-best “gold-medal” matchup since 1996? Yeah, I’d say it’s going to be a huge moment in the history of both countries’ hockey programs.
(So huge, in fact, that Front Office Sports reports tickets to the title game fetching “low-end, get-in pricing of nearly $1,000 per ticket on multiple resale marketplaces” and over $3,000 on the high side — numbers that are on surprising par with those seen at Super Bowl LIX earlier this month.)
One of the biggest factors on the line in the 4 Nations final might simply be whether America can truly consider itself a hockey equal with its neighbor to the north, at long last. If that does end up being the case, it will have meant the U.S. has come a very long way over the years.
The entire history of the Canada-U.S. rivalry isn’t so much a “rivalry” as a decades-long Canadian victory tour. According to data from EloRatings.net, the Canadians have an all-time record of 119 wins, 48 losses and 21 ties versus the Americans, good for a winning percentage of 68.9 percent. Canada is the home of hockey, you might think, so they probably beat everyone that badly — but their combined record against every other country (952-420-142) is worse, with a winning percentage of 67.6 percent.
In the head-to-head history of the matchup, Canada has beaten the U.S. by a cumulative goal differential of +275 in 188 games, or +1.46 GPG. Of course, in last week’s piece about international hockey, I noted that the full history of these programs includes a variety of different tournaments — of which only a small share actually involve the top players in the world. So is it possible that things look better for America when we only consider the true best-on-best competitions?
Not really. Going back to the 1976 Canada Cup, the Canadians are 16-5-1 against the Americans in games featuring NHL players, an even better head-to-head winning percentage (75.0 percent) than they had in games that weren’t best-on-best (68.1 percent). Any way you slice it, this rivalry — if you could call it that at different times — has been extremely lopsided over the years.
Things have gotten more interesting in recent years, however. If you plot Canada’s cumulative goal differential in the rivalry, the bulk of the damage was done before the 1970s, a decade when the Canadian stranglehold on NHL talent started to loosen. The pace at which Canada added to its cumulative goal differential went from +2.9 GPG through the 1960s to +0.8 from the 1970s through the 2000s, and finally just +0.1 since 2010.
The U.S. has actually posted a positive goal differential (+1) over the past 17 games of the rivalry, dating back to August 2011. (Granted, only five of those games featured NHL players, but still.) In a matchup traditionally defined by its one-sidedness, things have gotten surprisingly even surprisingly fast in head-to-head games between the Americans and Canadians in recent years.
That evenness has carried over in games against common opponents as well.
In my previous piece about the 4 Nations, I calculated Hockey-Reference style Simple Rating System (SRS) scores for each country in NHL-only games over the years, including the specific range of years since the fall of the Soviet Union, a moment that seemed to transform international hockey from a two-team battle between Canada and the USSR to a fairly even fight across the top tier of Canada, the U.S., Finland, Sweden and Russia. If we recalculate those ratings to include the 2025 4 Nations results to date, we find that the Americans’ rating has now actually (very slightly) surpassed that of the Canadians in the post-Cold War period:
For all intents and purposes, then, Thursday’s title game isn’t between the big-brother Canadians and little-brother Americans. It’s between a longstanding powerhouse that still carries as much respect as ever, and the upstart to the south whose concentrated economic and cultural efforts to build a competitive hockey program have finally yielded a top-level squad on equal footing with its rival. No longer is the U.S. merely hoping to pull off an upset — it’s expecting to win.
The Americans have been in a version of this position before, though. There was the 1991 Canada Cup, when the U.S. rolled into the final after dropping 7 goals on Sweden, only to be swept 2-0 by Wayne Gretzky and Co. The epic 1996 World Cup final series, won in a shocking road comeback by Team USA, seemed to signal that America was ready to permanently tangle with Canada on equal terms. But the 2002 and, most painfully, 2010 Olympic finals proved that Team Canada was far from ready to share the mountaintop with the Americans.
Additional U.S. setbacks since 1996 included a 1-0 loss to Canada in the semifinals of the 2014 Olympics, with Carey Price outdueling Jonathan Quick in net to advance. And the 2016 World Cup was a total flop for the Americans, who washed out of the group stage without winning a single game — one of its losses coming courtesy of the Great White North.
So now comes the latest chapter of the rivalry, one set against the backdrop of geopolitics and strained relations. One team will win an inaugural 4 Nations event that had no business being this good — and meaning this much. The other will resume the NHL season with a deep sense of disappointment, no matter that the tournament was mainly contrived to fill the All-Star break and arguably didn’t even feature the four best hockey nations in the world.
The passion of the players made it matter, and there is no more passionate a rivalry in the sport right now than Canada versus the United States. Once a lopsided battle, now a true clash of equals. Game on.
NHL kicks the butt of every other professional sport with these one off events. The winter classic always hits too!