I fixed the IIHF World Championships, because nobody asked

The NHL can’t decide what they want to do when it comes to international competitions. They’ve constantly flip-flopped on going to the Olympics, and the World Cup of Hockey, while a great idea, was a little weird considering we had Team North America (which was just the US/Canada U-23 All-Star team) and Team Europe (or some of Europe as I called them). The NHL allows players to freely go to the annual IIHF World Championships in the spring with no real difficulties. The problem? These take place in the middle of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, so you only get about half the players you’d like to take to a true best-on-best tournament, if you’re lucky.

A quick Disclaimer: I love seeing NHL players at the Olympics. It gave us Crosby’s “Golden Goal” in 2010, and getting to watch hockey and party instead of working at work during the 2014 game. Best-on-best hockey rules. But I’m tired of the NHL’s constant indecisiveness. They decided not to go to the 2018 games in PyeongChang, South Korea, because of travel, time changes, and stopping the season for two weeks. yet they decided to return to for the 2022 games in China, where many of those same issues apply, with the added bonus of COVID-19, and China being somewhat of a human rights dumpster fire, to put it mildy. COVID-19 forced their hand and they have since withdrawn from participating at the upcoming Olympics. Their future participation in Olympics is still undecided. I'm tired of the "well we dunno, we'll figure it out maybe, but we'll see I guess" game. Either you’re in, and you’re in for good, or you’re out, and you don’t come back. Just pick a lane so we can move on without trying to guess whatever you might thinking.

So, let’s get back to the heart if the issue. The NHL isn't sure if they want to schedule another World Cup of Hockey themselves. That's where the IIHF World Championships come in. For starters, we’re going to do one of two things. We either move it to the fall and it get’s played in September, before the NHL season and training camps, or we go with option 2, where the NHL starts their season sooner (Early September instead of early October) and their season ends sooner (preferably early May as opposed to mid June). Either of those two options solve the main issue of clashing with the playoffs. I would also move it to being every second year, as opposed to every other year, playing it in odd numbered years so that it doesn’t fall during the same years as the Olympics or FIFA World Cup and gets forgotten about.

In terms of the format, I would keep the it as it is now; a 16-team format, with the lowest placed teams going to the IIHF D2 tournament. I do think that 2 pools of 8 is a bit much, but it does create more of an opportunity for unpredictability and chaos than 4 groups of 4, so we’ll stick with that too. The NHL can send more of its best players to the tournament, without having to worry about Olympic commitment or trying to organize its own, weird version of the World Cup. And the IIHF version doesn’t get buried by taking place at the same time as the NHL playoffs, so they get more high-quality players and exposure. It also doesn’t fall into the trap of “oh yeah, I guess the World Championships are on now huh?” that it usually does. Win-Win.