4 Nations participants have big advantage going into Olympics

The Coaches Room is a regular feature throughout the 2025-26 season by former NHL coaches and assistants who turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher. In this edition, Dan Bylsma, former coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Buffalo Sabres and Seattle Kraken, assistant with the New York Islanders and Detroit Red Wings and coach of the 2014 United States Olympic team, discusses how the coaches will prepare their lineups and get the players ready for the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. The men's ice hockey preliminary round begins Feb. 11.

Going into any competition, you need to plan for good, you need to plan for bad, and you need to plan for all the situations that are going to come up in the game. So, going into the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, the coaches will already know these things.

All the situations that are going to happen in the game -- power play, post power play, penalty kill, post penalty kill, 5-on-5, 4-on-4, 3-on-3, shootout -- you plan for those things, and you plan for the adjustments that you could make in the game. "If someone's playing well or not playing well, then we're doing this."

So, the coaches of the 4 Nations Face-Off last season -- Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States -- have a huge advantage because they already have an idea of who plays well together and who doesn't, who fits, who doesn't. The coaching staff for Team USA knows some players play well together and have chemistry and some don't, so they're not going to try to force a situation they know doesn't work.

Coaches have a cadence to how they change lines. If you look at every coach's line changes, you know who they trust in this situation. That's who they put out.

This one is not hard for us all to see, but while coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Mike Sullivan started Sidney Crosby's line in almost every game. Then, there's starts of periods, after a goal for, after a goal against, so if I was looking at what Sullivan is going to do as coach of Team USA and what adjustments they're going to make, I would just look at the 4 Nations.

I'm certain we could tell that Sullivan tends to do certain things with his lineup and his matchups and who's going to play post power play and who's going to play post penalty kill and so on and so forth.

The first power play at 4 Nations was Matthew Tkachuk, Jack Hughes, Auston Matthews and Jack Eichel with Adam Fox as the lone defenseman. I'm going to assume that Quinn Hughes, who missed 4 Nations with an injury, goes in for Fox, who is not on the team. The second unit was Brady Tkachuk, Jake Guentzel, Kyle Connor and Matt Boldy with Zach Werenski as the defenseman. With the exception of Connor, depending on if he plays, I'm assuming that will be the second unit.

Then, you go to your post-power-play lines. Dylan Larkin and Tage Thompson will maybe play on a line together, so probably your first line post power play is Larkin, Thompson and a fill-in for Jack Hughes because he was on the power play a minute ago. Brock Nelson would be a potential fill-in for that spot.

The second line post power play will be probably the fourth line, if it is Clayton Keller, Vincent Trocheck and J.T. Miller. Then on the third change, you'd see the coach get back to the normal rotation of lines. He'd have Brady Tkachuk, Eichel and Matthew Tkachuk, if that's going to be the first line, at his disposal at that time.

I think the second line will be Guentzel, Matthews and Boldy and the third line will be -- this is speculation -- Larkin on the wing with Jack Hughes and Thompson. If the fourth line is Keller, Trocheck and Miller, that would leave Nelson and Connor as your 13th and 14th forwards.

Teams can dress 20 skaters and two goalies at the Olympics, so I'm assuming they're going to go with 13 forwards and seven defensemen. Some European teams dress eight defensemen and 12 forwards, but North American teams have typically dressed 13 forwards and seven defensemen.

Replacing the injured Seth Jones with Jackson LaCombe means Team USA will have only two right-handed defensemen -- Charlie McAvoy and Brock Faber. If Jones was healthy, because of the lefty-righty balance, I think he would've been in the top six on the right side. Now, one of the options would be to move Jaccob Slavin to the right side and play Jake Sanderson, who might not have been in the top six if Jones was available.

Again, they've done this before at 4 Nations. They've had different matchups and experimented with different things and saw how the player reacts in the situation, so it may be easy for them to say, "Slavin is going to move to the right side and Sanderson will play on the left and that's our PK pair anyway, so we're good with it.

I also think you go into the tournament knowing you have three games to play in the round robin, so to say Slavin is going to move to the right side and Sanderson will slide in, that might just be for the first game and in the second game, LaCombe or Noah Hanifin could play there. They're probably going to dress at least seven defensemen, so that provides flexibility within a game to have a different matchup, or a different lefty slide over to the right side. I'm sure there's planning for potential different lineups for the first three games, even with the goalies.

The second part of the question is how do you get ready to play your first Olympic game with limited practice time? I think at the 2014 Sochi Olympics we had 2 1/2 practices -- half a practice being a morning skate -- before playing our first game. It's a somewhat impossible task to think that you're going to implement all the systems, all the details with just 2 1/2 practices.

The approach of all the staffs that I've been on in international hockey is you talk about a process over the course of the first nine days, including when you're playing the three round-robin games, of implementing your system, how you want to play, details and expectations of what we're doing as a team, and we've got to keep getting better each and every time we step on the ice.

The round-robin games are an important part of the process. You want to be playing your best hockey. You all want to be on the same page when it comes to the most important game, which is the quarterfinal game.

This is another area where the teams that played at 4 Nations will have an advantage. The United States knew that Sullivan was going to be the coach at the Olympics, so what they did at 4 Nations is a big factor in terms of building what they're going to do in Milano Cortina.

It's largely the same team, so those players have a good idea of what coach Sullivan is going to say to them when they get to the Olympics. It's going to be building upon what they did at 4 Nations.