NHL launches new website chronicling League's Olympic history

History will be made this February when NHL players head to the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.

As they return to the Winter Games for the first time since 2014, the League is chronicling and celebrating its previous history at the Olympics with a new website.

The NHL’s Statistics & Information Department has launched a first-of-its-kind online resource that provides player and team records and highlights the League’s participation in the Olympics.

The new site, a branch of the NHL's Records page includes statistics, game-by-game results and tournament recaps from each of the five prior Winter Olympics involving NHL players -- Nagano (1998), Salt Lake City (2002), Turin (2006), Vancouver (2010) and Sochi (2014).

“It’s a combination of wanting to celebrate the history of what our players have done previously, but also looking forward to Milano Cortina,” NHL communications director Josh Bernstein said. “We know how excited our players and fans are, so we want to make sure that we highlight the League’s history at the Olympics. We want to have a place for people to go to so, when they’re watching this year’s tournament, they can see that history and how players in 2026 stack up against previous editions of the event.”

But it’s more than just scores. Fans can explore a host of facts and figures, like countries with the most gold medals (Canada, three), players with the most total medals (Teemu Selanne and Kimmo Timonen, four each with Finland) and goaltenders with the most tournament wins (Henrik Lundqvist, 12-3-0 with Sweden) in those five tournaments.

“It’s a great way for people who may not be that familiar with the NHL participation in the Games going back to Nagano to kind of connect with what they’ll see next month in Italy, with how it started (28) years ago,” said Stuart McComish, senior manager, NHL research and statistics. “And it’s not just from Canada and the U.S., but from all the other countries that have been part of it, including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Italy and so on.”

The Olympic records site follows up on the creation of an International records section launched before last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off that covered Canada Cup events of 1976, 1981, 1984, 1987 and 1991, and subsequent World Cup of Hockey tournaments in 1996, 2004 and 2016.

But the origin of the Winter Olympics effort began well before then, McComish said.

“It was probably around 2021, we first kind of started banging it around, ‘We’ve got to do this,’” he said. “There was talk about going back to the Olympics at some point, ‘We have to have room for that too.’ From the beginning to where we’re going to be this week, it’s been a long process.”

Brendon Crossman, senior director of NHL statistics and information, said the marathon process of compiling the Olympics information and building the site turned into a sprint after 4 Nations that involved a large crew working tirelessly behind the scenes.

It became an all-hands effort to scour NHL, International Ice Hockey Federation and Olympics stats, box scores and media accounts, as well as rigorous fact-checking to create a comprehensive product.

Stick taps go to the stats and information team that also includes Scott Rodgers, Mike Biergard, Amanda Butterfield, John Burd, Liv Holmes and Brett Kozak.

The IT team included Neil Pierson, Kevin Sullivan, Kiersten Page, Aliaksei Haiduchonak and Ivan Leschinsky.

“So next month, when a goaltender stands on his head or a player scores a hat trick or anything like that, we’re going to be able to put that into context across the five (Olympic) Games that we participated in over that timeframe, and be able to point our fans and our media and our clubs to a resource that we built from scratch,” Crossman said.