Familiarity and experience a key part of Canada’s roster construction

One major complaint about Canada’s roster for the 2026 Olympics was how many players are returning from the team who barely snuck away with the tournament win at the 4 Nations Face-Off. 19 players from 4 Nations are playing in this tournament, including some questionable choices like Jordan Binnington, Drew Doughty and Colton Parayko.

But perhaps the familiarity of bringing in the same players will serve as an advantage for Canada, especially when it was successful the first time around. Jeff Marek joined Daily Faceoff Live to talk about Canada’s roster decisions and how the chemistry from 4 Nations could be a big factor in repeated success.

Jeff Marek: There’s a familiarity certainly, and there’s a “we’ve gone to war once with these guys”. You’re always going to bring in new players to freshen it up, but these are the guys that when you tap them on the shoulder, you have a good idea of what they’re going to do when they jump over the boards.

Whether it’s Parayko or Doughty, which would be the two possible candidates [to swap out]. I would look at Evan Bouchard, as we all have, and said, “I would put Evan Bouchard ahead of those two guys all day long, or Matthew Schaefer or Jacob Chychrun”. I understand it.

But if you want to have a look at Team Canada, the one thing, and McDavid references in that Players’ Tribune piece as well. Hockey Canada puts a real premium on guys that have won on the biggest stage. And count the Cups. Okay? Certainly not Macklin Celebrini, not Connor McDavid. But Tom Wilson, Nathan McKinnon, Brad Marchand, Sidney Crosby, Mark Stone, Reinhart. Go to the court of the defenders as well. Go to Jordan Binnington, who will probably be the starting goaltender against Czechia.

They put a real premium on that experience. You can’t say the same thing about where the United States has put their premium. Count the Cups. Jake Guentzel. Jack Eichel. Matthew Tkachuk. But there’s a whole lot of no’s here.

And as we all expect this to go this way, where it’s Canada facing off against the United States, there’s a couple of different philosophies here, right? The guys that have won before versus we’re just trying to piece together lines that we think are going to be successful. And we should point out, a murderer’s row on the back end, led by probably the best shutdown pair in the entire tournament in Jaccob Slavin and Brock Faber. We saw that last year at the 4 Nations.

You can watch the full episode here…