Report: NHL Likely to Play Games in China, Sweden Next Season

The NHL is crossing oceans in an attempt to grow the sport, and its brand.

The league, pending NHLPA approval, will play two regular-season games in Sweden as well as an exhibition contest in China during the 2017-18 season, according to TSN's Darren Dreger.

The Ottawa Senators and Colorado Avalanche will reportedly be part of a two-game regular season mini-series in Sweden in November, while the Vancouver Canucks and Los Angeles Kings are expected to play exhibition game in China sometime in the fall.

The NHL has dabbled with exhibition and regular-season games in Europe before, most notably from 2007-11 when the league put on the NHL Premiere Series, where select clubs opened up the regular season across various European cities. It will be the NHL's first venture into Asia since an exhibition mini-series between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Nashville Predators was played in Saitama, Japan, in 2000.

The Canucks and Kings series would be the NHL's first crack at hosting a game in China—hockey's largest untapped market—and the report comes shortly after NHL deputy commissioner Billy Daly returned from a trip to discuss the future of NHL games in the country and to meet with Chinese officials ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

The report also comes days after both Daly and commissioner Gary Bettman expressed doubt as to whether the NHL would participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

"Everyone there kept telling me: 'We've got a long way to go to catch up to basketball in China,' but the bottom line is the younger demographic really connects with our game and thinks it's cool," Daly told Postmedia of his trip last month.

"A lot of that has been spurred by the announcement of the Beijing Winter Olympics. I met with a couple of government officials in different capacities and a lot of people are focused on building some grassroots infrastructure and building a national team that can be competitive at the Olympics, even if they don't win a game. There's a desire to do that."

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 Las Vegas.

Hockey-loving Europe is not untraditional, but it is unconventional, and the league is hoping to build off momentum it created before taking a five-year hiatus from the continent. The NHL Premiere Series ran from 2007-11, when the NHL opened up the regular season with games in Austria, England, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Russia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Latvia.

The last international NHL game to take place on non-European soil happened just prior to the 2006-07 season, when the New York Rangers beat the Florida Panthers 3-2 in the first and only game ever played in Puerto Rico.