EVER since 1998, when North America’s National Hockey League (NHL) began putting its season on hold to allow its players to participate in the Olympics, men’s ice hockey has been a signature sport at the winter games. Elite squads from Canada, the home country of nearly half of the players in the NHL, took gold medals in 2010 in Vancouver and 2014 in Sochi. And from 1998 to 2014, every men’s ice-hockey medal has gone to Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden, or the United States—not coincidentally, the six countries best represented on NHL rosters.

For this year’s games in Pyeongchang, those half-dozen nations were forced to assemble their teams without their biggest stars. NHL owners, sceptical of the benefit they would reap from a tournament in South Korea at the expense of a mid-season break and injury risk to their players, forbade their charges to participate for the first time since the 1994 games. Four years ago, John Tavares, then the captain of the New York Islanders, was one of four players who suffered season-ending injuries representing their countries. Moreover, NHL officials believe that Olympics held outside North America—the 1998 games in Nagano, Japan; the 2006 games in Turin, Italy; and the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia—contributed little to their efforts to increase interest in hockey around the globe. The final straw was the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to stop paying for the travel, accommodation and hefty insurance costs of NHL players.

The short-term impact of the NHL’s decision is easily visible on the ice, at least to those fans still watching. Canada, the defending champions, have patched together a squad with over 5,000 games of NHL experience, most of them now competing in European circuits. These second-tier players proved good enough to trounce a pair of weaklings in Switzerland and South Korea, but were beaten by the Czech team, whose players have combined for a relatively modest 1,330 games in the NHL. Canada is not the only once-favoured nation to suffer an early-round hiccup. The United States lost their first contest against Slovakia, whose roster accounts for just 593 games of NHL experience. The squad of Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR), who cannot compete under their national flag as a punishment for doping violations, fell to Slovenia, a hockey minnow, in their group-stage opener.

The usual suspects still remain the favourites. Thanks in part to a round-robin format that is forgiving of early missteps, Russia, Canada and America have all advanced to the quarter-finals. Nonetheless, the biggest winners from the NHL’s absence are the underdogs. One simulation of the tournament that used NHL stars instead of the actual Olympic rosters gave Canada a 29% chance of winning the gold, followed by 26% for the United States and 19% for Russia. The seven weakest teams combined for only a 6% probability of victory. In contrast, a pre-Olympics forecast based on the statistics of the players competing in South Korea suggests that there is a nearly one-in-four chance that one of those seven squads will come out on top. The same forecast rearranges the top of the table, as well, setting the team of Russians as the favourite with a 25% chance of a gold medal, followed by Sweden (20%) and Canada (16%). The United States began the tournament with a measly 8% chance, and those odds were halved after the team lost two of its three group-stage contests.

The main consequence of the NHL sitting this one out, then, is a major boost in the medal chances for the Russian squad. Although the team certainly suffers from the absence of its NHL stars—including both of the NHL’s top two goal scorers (Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin) and the winner of last year’s award for the best NHL goaltender (Sergei Bobrovsky)—Russia’s domestic circuit, the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), is the world’s second-strongest. As a result, far more players who are at least close to NHL calibre were available to play for the OAR team than for any other country. The squad includes a pair of former NHL all-stars in Pavel Datsyuk and Ilya Kovalchuk, who are each playing in their fifth Olympics. Moreover, since the roster draws heavily on two KHL clubs, CSKA Moscow and SKA St. Petersburg, its players will share the ice with familiar teammates, an advantage most of the other nations will not enjoy. At the other extreme, the American squad is perhaps the most patchwork bunch of them all. It mixes college prospects with minor leaguers and others toiling in Europe, some of whom met only recently via a video call. The last time the United States won the gold medal was in 1980, with an amateur squad that trained and competed together for months, so American fans hoping for a replay of that year’s “Miracle on Ice” will probably be disappointed.

In the longer term, the NHL’s absence is likely to backfire on the league. The IOC, in an unsuccessful effort to push the NHL to continue participating by raising the cost of sitting out, coupled involvement in Pyeongchang with that of the 2022 games in Beijing. The same injury and season-disruption concerns apply to the next Olympiad in Asia. But as North America’s major sports jostle for market share in China, an uninspiring hockey tournament in Beijing would be a major blow to the NHL’s efforts to broaden its appeal in a sporting market increasingly dominated by the National Basketball Association. Even within hockey, the NHL is losing ground in China: last season, the KHL launched a new franchise, Kunlun Red Star, in Beijing. And the Canadian Women’s Hockey League already includes a pair of clubs in Shenzhen.

Even more troubling for NHL owners is that their decision went against the wishes of the players. The league’s current collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) extends through the 2021-22 season, but its players’ association has the right to opt out on September 1st 2019, well in advance of the Beijing games. The NHL’s labour negotiations have never been easy: the league has suffered three lockouts since 1994, including one that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. The owners are eager to win the players’ co-operation in their preferred vision of global expansion, including pre-season games in China and an NHL-owned reboot of the World Cup of Hockey. But players who watched their peers and heroes compete for Olympic gold are unlikely to be sated with the promise of inferior medals. Club owners’ desire to avoid a fortnight’s break this season may cost them revenue from many more games if negotiations for the next CBA go awry.

For the remainder of the Pyeongchang games, fans must settle for the usual perks of second-tier international competition, including a view of some KHL stars rarely seen abroad, and an early look at some youngsters who are not yet ready for the NHL. North American puck-heads intent on seeing their representatives on the podium can also shift their focus to women’s ice hockey, in which Canada and the United States are heavily favoured. If that is not enough, they can always stick with the league’s regularly scheduled programming. NHL teams are still competing as if they are the only game in town.