🏒Competitions

The world's top professional league and the pinnacle of club hockey, the NHL comprises 32 teams across the United States and Canada following expansion to Vegas in 2017 and Seattle in 2021. It draws the best players from every hockey nation, and its 82-game regular season culminates in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Founded in 1917, it generates the sport's largest revenues and audiences and sets the global standard for talent, pace and competition. Winning the NHL is universally regarded as the highest achievement in the club game.

The Stanley Cup, first awarded in 1893, is the oldest trophy competed for by professional athletes in North America and the most coveted prize in hockey. Since 1927 it has gone to the NHL champion, decided by a gruelling four-round playoff of best-of-seven series played each spring. Overtime is sudden-death and can run for multiple periods, producing the sport's most dramatic moments. Each player on the winning team gets a day with the Cup, and every name is engraved on it, a tradition unmatched in sport.

Olympic ice hockey debuted at the 1920 Antwerp Games and has anchored the Winter Olympics since 1924. It has produced the sport's most iconic moments, from the 1980 Miracle on Ice to Sidney Crosby's 2010 golden goal. From 1998 through 2014 the NHL paused its season to send its stars, creating best-on-best hockey of the highest quality. Canada, Russia and the former USSR, Sweden, Finland, Czechia and the United States are the traditional powers competing for gold on the international stage.

Held annually since 1930, with roots in the 1920 Olympic tournament, the World Championship is the sport's premier yearly national-team event, organized by the International Ice Hockey Federation. Because it takes place each spring during the NHL playoffs, it draws stars whose clubs have been eliminated plus Europe's best. Held in May, it regularly fills large European arenas. Canada and Russia lead the all-time medal count, with the Nordic nations and Czechia perennial contenders in the top division.

Founded in 2008 as a successor to the Russian Superleague, the KHL is the strongest league outside the NHL, based primarily in Russia with clubs in several neighbouring countries. Its champion wins the Gagarin Cup. The KHL offers a wide, international-size ice surface and a distinct style, and has served as a high-level destination for stars and a development ground for young Russian talent. Geopolitical tensions have reshaped its membership in recent years, but it remains a major force in world hockey.

The annual under-20 World Juniors, held every year around New Year's, is a showcase of the sport's future stars and a genuine phenomenon in Canada, where games draw massive television audiences. Officially launched in 1977, it has featured nearly every great player early in his career. Canada, Russia, the United States, Sweden and Finland dominate the medals. Its win-or-go-home intensity over the holidays has produced countless memorable moments and launched innumerable NHL careers.

Europe's premier club competition, the modern Champions Hockey League launched in 2014, bringing together top teams from the continent's national leagues, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Czechia and others, in a Champions League-style format. It crowns a European club champion each season. While it lacks the NHL's talent, it has grown steadily in prestige and gives Europe's best clubs a cross-border stage, deepening the continent's rich domestic hockey traditions.