The NHL Is Trying to Make Inroads in China

The NHL's deputy commissioner will be making a trip to China later this January in hopes of growing the game, but it's not to secure NHL participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Instead, Bill Daly will be travelling to visit hockey's largest untapped market—one holding a population of over 1.3 billion people—in order to evaluate the viability and practicality of holding future NHL exhibition games in China, possibly as early as next season.

Daly told Yahoo, "I think it's fair to say we hope to be in a position to stage NHL games there, probably initially preseason games and then potentially on a longer-term basis, regular-season games.

"We're working on that possibility potentially as early as next year and with this visit, we'll know a lot more about whether we can pull that off or not."

League commissioner Gary Bettman will reportedly not be making the trip, but plans to visit later in the spring when the next steps in the process will take place, according to Daly. He also told Yahoo that the league would like to host the first preseason game in China for 2017-18, but couldn't guarantee it will happen.

The league has been making a notable push to infiltrate non-traditional hockey markets before other big players throughout the major sports scene—the NFL, NBA, and MLB—get there first. Last year, the NHL became the first major North American sports league to be granted a franchise in the much-sought after Las Vegas market. With the Golden Knights set to take the ice to start the 2017-18 season, the NHL appears determined to also be the first of the Big Four to set its flag on Chinese soil.

It's certainly no small task, though, as travel logistics and a lack of hockey culture or history will make it more than challenging for the NHL to cement hockey as part of the foundation of China's future athletic movement.

The 37th-ranked men's national team, one that competes three tiers below the game's top countries in international tournaments, is, well, barely a program at all. It sits behind countries like Australia and Israel in the IIHF world rankings, and has (probably) decades of work to do before its even on the same level as other Asian nations, like Japan and South Korea, currently ranked No. 21 and No. 23, respectively.

It's not a very pretty picture at the top level of China's international hockey program, and, although growing rapidly, the country's enrollment at the youth and grassroots level is quite underwhelming to say the least. According to the IIHF website, China has just over 1,100 registered hockey players and 154 indoor ice rinks throughout the country. For a nation that boasts a population of 1.3 billion, that's literally nothing—0.00000081 percent of their population. To contrast, Canada has over 639,500 registered hockey players and over 3,200 indoor rinks for a country with a population hovering around 35 million people.

But China's hockey prowess doesn't need to rival that of Canada's, it just has to start growing, and that's exactly what's happening, with over 400 full-sized rinks scheduled to be built by 2020. Eight years ago, there were only around 300 unregistered hockey players at the elementary level across the country, a number that has climbed to roughly 3,000 today, according to last year's general manager of China's Under-18 national team, Longmou Li.

Every great change has to start somewhere, and those from the league are pulling out all the stops to ensure that the next great sporting revolution in China begins, and ends, with the letters N.H.L.