Eddie Olczyk and Kenny Albert Credit: NBC Sports
By Sam Neumann on

Eddie Olczyk understands why the Olympics need to keep a schedule for the Closing Ceremony, but he’d prefer Olympic hockey gold medals be decided in 5-on-5 overtime before resorting to 3-on-3.

Olczyk, who called Sunday’s USA-Canada gold medal game for NBC alongside Kenny Albert and Brian Boucher, addressed the 3-on-3 overtime format during an appearance on 104.3 The Fan in Chicago on Monday after Jack Hughes scored the golden goal to give the United States its first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since 1980.

“I would like to see them start at 5-on-5 for 10 minutes, and if nothing happens, then you go to 4-on-4,” Olczyk said. “If you want to go five minutes, but pick a number. I think it’s arbitrary. And then, well, because people may not understand, it’s the last event of the Olympics.”

The gold medal game went to overtime, tied 1-1 after regulation. Under Olympic rules, playoff games that reach overtime go directly to 3-on-3 sudden death. Hughes scored 1 minute and 41 seconds into the extra frame to win it for the Americans, immediately sparking debate about the format.

The NHL uses 3-on-3 for regular-season games, but when the Stanley Cup is on the line, teams play continuous 5-on-5 sudden-death overtime periods until someone scores. Those games can stretch to double, triple, or even quadruple overtime. That’s how hockey, according to Olczyk, is supposed to be played when everything is on the line.

But the Olympics can’t do that.

The men’s hockey gold medal game was the final event of the Winter Olympics. The Closing Ceremony was scheduled for 2:30 p.m. ET Sunday, the same day as the gold medal game. The ceremony took place in Verona, about a two-hour drive from the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena in Milan, where the hockey game was played. The ceremony couldn’t start until the athletes from the final event arrive.

“You have closing ceremonies,” Olczyk said. “Terry Gannon from Joliette — another Chicago native — is sitting about 3 or 4 rows from me. He did an amazing job in the figure skating and the opening and closing ceremonies. They’re on a schedule.”

The scheduling constraint means the gold medal game has to finish with enough time for everyone involved to travel from Milan to Verona. That rules out the possibility of multiple 20-minute overtime periods. The IOC needs a winner in a reasonable timeframe, which is why they went directly to 3-on-3.

“I think for us at NBC, we’d love to see a triple overtime game because you might end up getting 50, 60 million people at prime time,” Olczyk acknowledged. “But I think for the athlete, and for the game, I’d like to see it 5-on-5 for a period of time.”

“Eventually you’ve got to get to a winner so that the Olympics can close officially because if the Olympics closing ceremonies were going on and the men were still playing, it would obviously be a conflict of interest, and I don’t think the Olympic Committee would probably take too kindly to that,” he added. “But for us in the hockey game, I think we would take a 3 or 4 overtime game to settle a gold medal, and I think we’d be talking about that type of a game for many, many years.”

The USA’s 2-1 overtime win gave the Americans their first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since the 1980 Miracle on Ice. It marked the first time NHL players competed in the Olympics since 2014, after the league skipped the 2018 and 2022 Games. The appetite for best-on-best international hockey with NHL players has been proven repeatedly, as the 4 Nations Face-Off drew huge numbers last year, and the Olympics delivered again despite the early morning start time for North American viewers.

Whether the game should have been decided with 3-on-3 overtime is a different conversation. But as long as the gold medal game is the final event before the Closing Ceremony — scheduled for the same day, requiring athletes to travel between venues — the format won’t change.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann