NHL Cancels 2026 All-Star Game, Will Substitute With International Event

The 2026 NHL All-Star Game has been frozen out—for the second year in a row. 

The league will replace next year’s All-Star Weekend with an international event, the AP reported Monday. The new event will kick off the winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, which will see the return of NHL players to the games for the first time since 2014. The nature of the substitute event next February has not yet been announced.

This year, the league replaced the 2025 All-Star event with 4 Nations Face-Off, an international best-on-best competition featuring the top NHL players from Canada, the U.S., Finland, and Sweden. The NHL hoped the event would breathe new life into a tired All-Star Game format that has lost viewers and interest over the past several years. The league got its wish: 4 Nations Face-Off smashed viewership records, ticket prices, and became an international phenomenon, even upstaging the NBA All-Star Weekend.

Prior to 4 Nations Face-Off, the league’s plan was to return to the traditional All-Star Game format. The venue—UBS Arena on Long Island, N.Y., home of the Islanders—was set. But since the massive success of this year’s pivot to international competition, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said multiple times the league was rethinking the standard All-Star Game format to capitalize on the 4 Nations Face-Off momentum.

“We’re reevaluating how we want to do things because I think we’ve raised the bar about as high as you can for an all-star game in any sport,” Bettman said at a news conference during the annual GM meeting in March. “And so we want to make sure whatever we do is up to the standards that we’ve created.”

The NHL will still host the 2026 international event at UBS Arena in February, with players departing from New York for the Winter Olympic Games in Italy. 

Still, the decision did not sit well with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who issued a letter to Bettman expressing her disappointment on Monday, underscoring that the NHL made the decision without consulting the state. She requested an additional All-Star Weekend or a similar event with equal or greater economic impact to make up for the unexpected change. Bettman told ESPN the letter was published without any advance communication with the league. He says the current plan is to return to Long Island with an “All-Star event” in 2027, though that, too, remains undefined. (In a stroke of irony, the Islanders won the first pick in this year’s NHL draft despite 3.5% odds to top Monday’s lottery.)

The pivot may signal a permanent change for the league’s approach to events during its annual break. In February, the NHL announced the World Cup of Hockey will return in 2028. Paired with the reintroduction of NHL players to the Olympics, beginning with the 2026 games, these events establish a new biannual calendar of international best-on-best play. 

The big question: Now that it’s opted to skip two traditional All-Star Games in a row, what will the NHL do in the years between the Olympics and World Cup going forward?