Who Rules Best-on-Best International Hockey?
And are the four nations of the 4 Nations actually the top, uh, four nations?
Instead of a traditional NHL All-Star Game, the hockey world has instead been focused this week on the international game, with the start of the 4 Nations Face-Off — a four-team tournament featuring NHL players from Canada, the United States, Sweden and Finland. And if the opening contest on Wednesday was any kind of indication, this is going to be a highly entertaining event:
However, there are also questions over whether an event billed as “best-on-best” — a real distinction to be made in the realm of international hockey tournaments, which don’t always feature NHL players — can truly be considered as such, given the absence of other countries such as (most notably) Russia and Czechia. The former was left out because of an ongoing IIHF ban over the Ukraine war; the latter due to both logistical concerns and simply having fewer NHL players than Finland.
Because of this, though, we’ll be missing nations representing 15 percent of NHL players, along with 17 percent of leaguewide goals and 16 percent of points. And we’re also missing two of the top teams from the era of best-on-best tournaments in hockey history — though there’s still a good argument to be had that the tournament organizers got it right anyway.
There are plenty of international hockey rankings out there, including the official IIHF one (which goes Canada-Finland-Czechia-Switzerland-USA-Sweden)1 and the World Ice Hockey Elo Ratings (where the order is Canada-Czechia-Finland-Russia-USA-Sweden). But with all due respect to both systems, they mostly include tournaments in which few, if any, truly world-class players are present. Unfortunately, then, they don’t really tell us much about who the elite countries are when the best players are selected to face off.
For that, we need to look at international events where NHL players participated, which have been surprisingly sparse over the years. According to Wikipedia’s compilation, the earliest event under that category was the 1972 Summit Series, which primarily2 featured Canada and the Soviet Union in a clash of cultures, tactics and styles that would affect how the game was played forever. The tense, eight-game affair was finally decided on the iconic goal that made Paul Henderson a Canadian national hero:
From that series up until Wednesday’s 4 Nations opener between Canada and Sweden, there were 374 best-on-best contests (including both friendlies and tournament games) in events featuring NHL players on national teams. I know this, because I recorded all of them in a handy spreadsheet — which I then used to rank the best countries according to a rating in the style of Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS). Specifically, each national team was rated on offense and defense in terms of goals scored/allowed per game relative to average, adjusted for strength of schedule and host-country advantage effects.3 Here are the ratings across the entirety of that period:
Unsurprisingly, the Soviets/Russians and Canadians have had by far the best hockey teams in that span, both sitting around 1.4 goals per game better than the average national squad. (For context, the 2022-23 Boston Bruins were 1.5 GPG better than average, and they might have been the greatest team in NHL history.) These were the original teams of the best-on-best era for a reason, with a near-monopoly on the world’s most elite hockey talent throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Canada is the canonical home of the sport, while the Russians helped perfect it under the coaching of Viktor Tikhonov.
The U.S. and Sweden are next-best, but lagged far behind the Top 2. Then comes Czechoslovakia, which later fed into the lineage of the Czech Republic squad that won the first ever gold medal of the Olympics’ NHL era in 1998. But the Czechs are only slightly above average overall — and the Finns have been marginally below average, with a negative offensive rating and a losing record.
In that context, the 4 Nations Face-Off isn’t quite the best-on-best showcase it’s purported to be. It’s missing the No. 1 historical team from the sample with NHL players participating internationally, as well as the fifth-best team, while including the sixth-best side instead.
However, we must acknowledge that the era in which the Soviets dominated international hockey was very different from the one that followed the collapse of the USSR and the fall of the Iron Curtain. The first international tourney of that era to feature NHL players was the 1996 World Cup of Hockey — an event that the U.S. won with an iconic roster that included one of my childhood favorites, Mike Modano, among other legends.
Americans outcompeting Canadians for the first time at one of these events? Surely this signaled a new era of best-on-best hockey in general, and it ended up proving true over the intervening three decades. If we just run our SRS ratings on results from the 1996 World Cup onward, the post-Cold War rankings paint a slightly different picture, one a lot more favorable for the current 4 Nations Face-Off:
In the modern age of best-on-best play, the top four teams happen to be exactly the same teams as the 4 Nations field in 2025: Canada, USA, Finland and Sweden. It’s also remarkable how closely matched the top four teams are — with just 0.13 goals per game separating No. 1 Canada from No. 4 Sweden. Russia is right there, too, only fractionally behind Sweden for No. 5, but there is a big drop-off to Czechia at No. 6, and then a massive chasm between them and No. 7 Slovakia.
In other words, the post-Cold War era has six above-average countries, and the inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off has the top four of them.
Why did things change, coalescing around our new leading quartet? Obviously, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a watershed moment in hockey history,4 throwing into flux what had been (at worst) Program 1B to Canada’s 1A when it came to producing top players. The breakup of the USSR meant that Russia was disorganized and no longer privy to talent from across the former Soviet Republics — players who, in previous decades, might have suited up for the Red Army machine but instead helped populate the rosters of teams like Latvia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Finland and Sweden also benefited from the post-Soviet shift, developing their own hockey identities outside the shadow of the USSR, while producing more elite NHL talent than ever before. And at the same time, the American game grew immensely with more teams located in more varied locales, leading to stars like current U.S. captain Auston Matthews coming out of places like Arizona. The rise of the NHL as a truly national league helped to further popularize the sport in the States — and as participation in hockey grew, so too did the depth and quality of American-born players, pushing the U.S. firmly into hockey’s elite tier of countries.
Meanwhile, Czechia’s decline in the rankings reflects how it was impacted by the split from Slovakia and the loss of a unified Czechoslovakian squad, which had historically been a perennial Olympic medalist in the pre-NHL days. (Perhaps they can follow David Pastrňák’s plan to re-unify Czechoslovakia… for hockey purposes, at least.)
The result has been a modern hockey world where Canada remains dominant, the U.S. has risen to near-equal footing with their northern neighbors, and Sweden and Finland have cemented themselves as elite nations, while former powers like Russia and Czechia have taken a step back — at least when it comes to performance in best-on-best tournaments featuring NHL players. It’s this trend, more than anything, that justifies the current 4 Nations Face-Off as a true representation of hockey’s present-day power structure.
Russia would be No. 2, but it is considered to be “not participating” in the IIHF program.
I say primarily because, in addition to Canada-USSR, there were also exhibitions between both Canada and Czechoslovakia.
Friendlies/exhibitions were also assigned half-weight compared with main tournament games.
On top of, you know, actual history.
One small point: If we’re going historically, Anatoli Tarasov would be considered the father of hockey in the Soviet era. I had a copy of his memoir Road to Olympus in the 70s, impossible to find now, though I do have a reprint paperback with a cheesy retitling of Russian Hockey Secrets (only one copy on abebooks and at was listed for $300).