Germany optimistic for Olympics with Draisaitl, more NHL stars on roster

CHICAGO -- For Leon Draisaitl, the roster for the German national team heading into the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 is looking pretty good.

“I like it. I like it a lot,” the Edmonton Oilers forward said in January. “I think we’ve got a lot of things covered when it comes to how you want to build a team. Obviously, it’s all about finding each other, finding your roles early and clicking, accepting your roles. But I really like the makeup of our group.”

It's a good makeup, considering the country’s NHL talent heading to the Olympics, which includes Draisaitl, Utah Mammoth forward JJ Peterka, Ottawa Senators forward Tim Stutzle, Minnesota Wild forward Nico Sturm, Detroit Red Wings defenseman Moritz Seider and Seattle Kraken goaltender Philipp Grubauer.

Germany is producing more players who are stars on this side of the pond. Can it be mentioned in the same vein as hockey’s best national teams, such as the United States, Canada, Sweden and Finland? Not yet.

But is Germany gaining ground?

“I think we are (getting closer), but you have to be honest about the whole situation,” Seider said before the season. “Yes, (at the Olympics) we’ll have the best team that ever stepped on the ice for German hockey, but also the other teams will have their best teams that are possibly out there and will compete with German players from our own league against the best NHL players there are right now.

“You just have to see it as a huge bonus to be part of the Olympic games and just really to embrace the whole moment. Then obviously in moments like that miracles can happen. But overall, you just have to really soak in the energy, the atmosphere and really be thankful for having the chance to play in a tournament like that.”

Germany is in Group C of the 12-team tournament, along with Latvia, the United States and Denmark. Germany plays its first game against Denmark on Feb. 12 (3:10 p.m. ET; Peacock, CBC Gem, TSN). It plays Latvia on Feb. 14 and the U.S. on Feb. 15.

Germany is looking for bigger and better results on the international front. It’s never won an international tournament. In 21 Olympic appearances, its best finish came when it won silver at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. Prior to that, it won bronze in the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics (West Germany) and the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. Germany also won silver at the 1930, 1953 (West Germany) and 2023 IIHF World Championships.

Now, Germany is coming into these Olympics with some NHL stars.

Draisaitl is the highest-scoring Germany-born player in NHL history, with 1,036 points (428 goals, 608 assists) in 845 games. This season, he is fifth in the NHL with 80 points (29 goals, 51 assists) in 55 games. In 2019-20, Draisaitl had 110 points (43 goals, 67 assists) in 71 games and won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL scoring leader, the Hart Trophy as most valuable player and the Ted Lindsay Award as most outstanding player, as voted by players.

Seider, who won the Calder Trophy as NHL rookie of the year in 2021-22, has 38 points (seven goals, 31 assists) in 58 games and is fourth in the NHL in ice time per game (25:40). Stutzle leads Ottawa with 61 points (28 goals, 33 assists) in 57 games.

Grubauer, who won the Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals in 2018 and was a finalist in 2020-21 for the Vezina Trophy, awarded to the best goalie in the NHL, is 11-6-3 with a 2.43 goals-against average and .916 save percentage in 22 games (19 starts) for the Kraken.

Peterka, who put up NHL career highs in assists (41) and points (68) with the Buffalo Sabres last season, has 38 points (20 goals, 18 assists) in 57 games with the Mammoth this season.

“Overall, I think they definitely have produced more talent in the last few years, I mean higher-end talent,” former NHL defenseman Dennis Seidenberg said.

Seidenberg, who played 859 NHL games with the Philadelphia Flyers, Phoenix Coyotes, Carolina Hurricanes, Florida Panthers, Boston Bruins and New York Islanders, also represented Germany at the 2002 Salt Lake City, 2006 Torino and 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

“We always had six to 10 Germans playing in the League, but these days most of the Germans who play in the League are superstars,” he said. “So that’s a little bit different from when I played. I don’t know, it just seems to produce more high-end talent.”

A big reason for that may be Marco Sturm. The Bruins coach was the general manager and coach of the German national team from 2015-18, guiding the country to a silver medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.

That success came after Sturm made changes.

“I just tried to build the foundation,” he said. “I think for me that was the biggest thing, starting with coming into the rink, have a daily routine and the practice habits. There’s a lot of things to it, on and off the ice. I think that the biggest thing for me was to change the culture a little bit and give them a guideline, how to be a professional hockey team or federation. I think that’s something I started and worked out well.

“I think that’s what they needed. They needed a guy just to guideline them and get things started in the right direction and then we added really good pieces, not just the hockey department, other departments too. And of course, the silver medal helped too. Sponsorships and media. So it kind of took some time but it definitely, definitely grew big time.”

Changes also came in the Deutsche Eishockey Liga (DEL), Germany’s top-tier hockey league, part of the development path for Seider and Stutzle, who both played for Adler Mannheim. Teams in the DEL began adding staff members that had been commonplace in North American hockey.

“All teams now have full-time [physiotherapists], full-time athletic coaches, and a lot of the teams work with sports psychologists,” German national team coach Harold Kreis said. “Players have a good supporting staff to get physically prepared, mentally prepared, and players invest a lot of time, too.”

Kreis played for German national and league teams from 1978-97 and was a coach in the DEL before becoming national team coach in 2023.

“It's a 12-month profession,” he said. “Players embrace that because there is competition in the league. The guys know if they want to increase value or contributions to the team, they have to be in good shape. A lot of the guys here get on the ice in the summer. Be it in Germany [or elsewhere], they’ll organize skill coaches for themselves. It seems they’re investing in themselves.”

Another difference is that the DEL now is comprised of mainly German players.

“For a couple of years we had unlimited imports and I think that hurt the development of the German players because they just couldn’t compete from [a] skill level, the whole training philosophy, conditioning and things,” Kreis said. “They just couldn’t keep up with the imports -- not just North American, but from other countries.”

Now, each team is allowed to have nine imports per game and 11 in total. It’s given German players, especially the younger ones, more opportunity.

“You don’t need the 40-year-old American or Canadian player from overseas anymore,” Seider said. “You can just use your own youth players that you spent so much time developing and finally can use them on the pro team and make something out of it.

“That’s the biggest difference from the past years. It would always be the easy way to pick an older guy and more experienced veteran guy than give a chance to a young guy who may make some mistakes but will turn out great in the long run. That’s what we did and what kind of flipped the switch for German hockey.”

Regardless of the any changes, though, one thing remains constant in German hockey: the work ethic.

“That’s always been something that we pride ourselves in,” Draisaitl said. “That’s always been what we hang our hat on at the end of the day. That’s what we’re going to look to do. We have a lot of skill and some superstar power as well, which will help of course. But at the end of the day we’re going to come over working hard.”

Germany continues to build its national program. According to the International Ice Hockey Federation, there are 16,552 male youth players (from the Under-8 level up to Under-20) in Germany, which has a population of about 84 million. Infrastructure does have to improve; Germany has 143 indoor and 76 outdoor IIHF-sized rinks.

Compare that to hockey-loving Finland, a much smaller country: Its population is about 5.6 million, but there are 34,847 male youth players as well as 300 indoor and 280 outdoor IIHF-sized rinks.

Still, with continued success and more players becoming stars in the NHL, there’s always the hope that more interest is generated for the next wave of German hockey players.

“Hockey will never trump soccer back home. That’s never going to happen,” Draisaitl said. “But if we can find a way to get more people involved, get more fans, get more kids that grab a hockey stick instead of a soccer ball, then we did our job. So, we’re excited about it and hopefully there’s more to come in the future.”

NHL.com senior director of editorial Shawn P. Roarke and senior writer Amalie Benjamin contributed to this report