MOSCOW — After a week of turmoil for Olympic hockey, Russia believes it is poised to be the big winner at the 2018 Games in South Korea.

The country has waited more than 25 years for an Olympic gold medal, and its top league wants to fight the N.H.L. for international markets, so the absence of N.H.L. players from the Pyeongchang Games next February could be, well, a golden opportunity.

The Olympics are “the biggest, most significant event in global sports,” said Vyacheslav Bykov, who won a gold medal as a player at the Games in 1988 and 1992 and later coached Russia’s national team. “Competing at the Olympics is much more important than the Stanley Cup."

The Russian hockey system is a tangled web of sports, government and commercial interests, but all of those parties see Olympic gold as a national priority. Since Bykov and the Unified Team of former Soviet republics won gold in Albertville, France, 25 years ago, the best Olympic result for Russia has been a 1-0 loss to the Czech Republic in the gold-medal game in 1998 — the first Olympic tournament in which N.H.L. players were allowed to take part. On its home ice in Sochi in 2014, Russia lost, 3-1, to Finland in the quarterfinals.