the in Hockey Hours gold February, U.S. at to before Federation the win International Beijing women’s Canada Olympics officials hockey beat Ice lamented medal events $15 having on sports’ OFF only biggest two stage.

The IIHF and IOC have discussed adding to that, and a new 3-on-3 league that debuted earlier this month could be another step toward more hockey on a global scale. With Hall of Famers Bryan Trottier, Grant Fuhr, Joe Mullen and Larry Murphy among the coaches and fast-paced games featuring plenty of goals, 3ICE is another experiment that could make 3-on-3 part of hockey’s longterm future.

“We want to get this thing off the ground and make sure it’s entertaining — it’s got the entertainment aspect to the degree we can possibly give it and give it some credibility,” said

Trottier, who won the Stanley Cup six times as a player. “All of us would be grateful for the opportunity to grow with this to the point where it does go bigger, better, Olympic, global: wherever the growth takes it.”

Seven years after the NHL adopted 3-on-3 for overtime in the regular season, 3ICE founder EJ Jhonson has big ideas about takng it international and eventually like baseball's Little League. World Series and annual adult. world championships.

Commissioner Craig Patrick, a back-to-back Cup winner in 1991 and ’92 as general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins and gold medalist as an assistant coach on the 1980 U.S. “Miracle On Ice” team, has been impressed with the available talent since tryouts in April and sees room for 3-on-3 hockey to carve out room in a crowded entertainment landscape. “A lot of sports are going to short-form type things, and that’s kind of what we are, like BIG3 basketball,” Patrick said. “There’s a cricket league in India that’s vastly followed and doing very, very well. There’s rugby sevens. Everybody’s doing something a little different in their sport, and we feel that this is the way to go for hockey.”

He’s not alone in that thinking. After 3-on-3 basketball debuted as an Olympic event in Tokyo last year, new IIHF president Luc Tardif has set the goal of doing the same for hockey.

It may not happen as soon as 2026 in Milan and Cortina, a men’s tournament that is again expected to feature NHL players after two Olympics without them, but 3-on-3 was tried at the Youth Winter Olympic Games in Lausanne in 2020 and will get another look with more serious competition at the same event in South Korea.