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The saga of the 2026 All-Star Game is now the saga of the 2027 All-Star Game.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said at his availability prior to the Stanley Cup Finals on Wednesday that UBS Arena will host “an event” in 2027, given that the 2026 version will be a watered-down Olympic kickoff, the details of which aren’t yet clear.
“We’ve concluded that whatever we do for next season needs to take into account that the players are gonna be very focused on getting to Milan and playing in the Olympics,” Bettman told reporters in Edmonton. “And we want to respect that. So there will be an event the following year at UBS and we’re still trying to figure out what we can do that will do justice to the level of interest and authenticity that we and the players created in 4 Nations. So that’s still a work in progress.”
A number of key issues are still unclear, namely the specifics of the events in both 2026 and 2027.
An NHL spokesman confirmed to The Post that the league still plans to hold an Olympic sendoff event at UBS this coming February and that the 2027 event will include “on-ice hockey.”
Beyond that, though, it’s not yet known what either event will actually be.
The NHL is a victim of its own success here.
Whatever Long Island gets, if it’s not as good as the 4 Nations Face-Off was this year, it will be considered a disappointment.
And there’s just no way that any kind of traditional All-Star Game will be as good as the no-holds-barred, Stanley Cup Final-level hockey that set the sports world alight in February.
“We set a pretty high bar for All-Star weekends in all sports,” Bettman said. “I think there was an announcement today that one league [the NBA] is changing its format in response to the success we had.”
The NHL, though, is only committed to international best-on-best hockey every other year, with the Olympics every four years and the World Cup of Hockey set to be held on a quadrennial basis starting in 2028.
That left the Islanders in limbo, and in limbo they remain.
