Lars Eller has pretty much done it all since being drafted 13th overall by the St. Louis Blues in 2007.
The centre has played close to 1200 games — plus more than 100 more in the playoffs, scoring the Stanley Cup-clinching goal for the Washington Capitals along the way — and has suited up for seven teams, bringing his two-way prowess and versatility to each.
But the Rødovre, Denmark native does have one more box to check: representing his country in the Olympics. He’ll check that box on Thursday, when he faces off against Senators teammate Tim Stützle and Team Germany at 3:10 p.m. EST.
“It’s one of those things in my career I haven’t had a chance to try, I feel like I’ve tried almost everything else,” Eller told Sens360 before leaving for Italy.
“It’ll be a cool thing to check off the list, and playing best-on-best with the national team, I haven’t had a chance to experience that before. I’ve played World Championships, but it’s never been all the best players, right? So just that fact, that we get to measure ourselves up against other nations, see where we stand, that’s a big motivation factor.”
The Danes have come a long way since 1949, when they were defeated 47-0 by Canada in their first appearance on the international hockey stage. Team Denmark punched their ticket to the 2022 Olympics in Beijing for the first time in the program’s history, but NHL players were eventually held out of those games due to concerns around COVID-19.
Eller captained the Danes back to Olympic qualification with wins over Great Britain, Norway, and Japan during a qualification tournament in Norway before the 2024–25 NHL season began. Eller tied for the team and division lead in points, with two goals and two assists through those three games.
The first — and as of now, the only — Danish player to win the Stanley Cup, Eller captained a group including Nikolaj Ehlers, Jonas Røndbjerg, Frederik Anderson, Mads Søgaard, and Nicklas Jensen (a former Canucks first-rounder, not his Senators teammate) during that qualification tournament.
All will return in Milan — plus Tampa Bay winger Oliver Bjorkstrand — along with an assortment of Danes playing in leagues like the AHL (Oscar Fisker-Molgaard), the Finnish Liiga (Alexander True and Joachim Blichfeld), the DEL (Patrick Russell), the SHL (Mikkel Aagaard), and others across Europe.
While Søgaard was up with the Senators in January, the two Senators had a chance to catch up and talk to each other about their excitement for the tournament. “It’s close to kind of the same roster, so it’ll be good to reconnect with a lot of those guys that were a part of qualifying with us,” said Eller.
“A lot of those guys will be there again, and they get to reap the rewards of what they did a year-and-a-half ago. From a bigger perspective, it’s been an even longer journey for a lot of guys. And for me too, some of them I played national team with them growing up for many, many tournaments and games, so that’s really cool.”
Indeed, Eller’s journey with the national team started more than two decades ago. As a 17-year-old, he scored twice and added five assists to help in Denmark’s first-ever promotion to the top division of the World Junior Championship.
Now 36, and with over 65 career games as a “Danish Lion” (an ironic team nickname given Eller’s own as “The Tiger”), Eller will don the national team’s sweater at the Olympics for the first time ever.
