The NHL is planning an international event at UBS Arena next February in lieu of the previously announced All-Star Weekend at the home of the New York Islanders, a source confirmed to ESPN on Monday.
The NHL has not announced its plans for the weekend before the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics.
“It’s going to be a spectacular international event,” a league source told ESPN’s Emily Kaplan.
Commissioner Gary Bettman has said on multiple occasions recently that the league has been rethinking what to do about the event after the success of the 4 Nations Face-Off international tournament earlier this year. The thought was always to use New York as a jumping off point for Milan, with players leaving from there to participate in the Olympics for the first time since 2014.
“We know we’ve set the bar high, which should be a good thing, not a problem,” Bettman said last week at a meeting of Associated Press Sports Editors in New York. “We’re going to make sure we do something. … We’ll have an event at UBS before we go to the Olympics, but then we’ll do something that’s more focused on a major hockey event for the following year.”
At his news conference wrapping up the general managers’ annual spring meeting last month, Bettman said the league was “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.”
“And so we want to make sure whatever we do is up to the standards that we’ve created,” Bettman added.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday that she wrote a letter to Bettman expressing her disappointment about the decision to hold a Winter Olympics kickoff event in place of All-Star Weekend, adding it was made without consulting with the state and requesting the league “bring a hockey event with equal or greater economic activity and cultural value to the region in 2027.”
Bettman told ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski on Monday that Hochul’s office didn’t reach out to the league before publishing its letter. He said the league is committed to holding events in February 2026 and 2027 at UBS Arena.
“With the players going to the Olympics, we started focusing on the fact that maybe whatever we decided to do, they were going to be more focused on getting to Milan,” Bettman said.
“So we said we’ll do a different event to kick off the fact that we’re going to the Olympics and then we’ll bring an ‘All-Star event’, whatever that is, the following year, back to Long Island. So they’re actually going to get two sets of events, not one,” he said. “There’s confusion by the media and there’s confusion by the governor’s office, and it’s really nothing that we’ve said. We want to make sure the event we deliver to the fans on Long Island is suitable, appropriate and consistent with the new level that we established with the 4 Nations Face-Off.”
The 4 Nations Face-Off, which featured teams representing the U.S., Canada, Sweden and Finland, drew sellout crowds and stellar ratings. It has the NHL considering different options for midseason festivities and even made the NBA contemplate doing something involving international play.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
