RALEIGH -- When the Olympic hockey competition begins tonight, Jussi Jokinen will be watching. Never mind the baffling snub by the Finnish team. Never mind the 10-hour time difference between Helsinki and Vancouver. The Carolina Hurricanes forward will be watching.
That Jokinen, the shootout ace whose omission from Team Suomi in the midst of a career year with the Hurricanes is beyond baffling, is willing to put aside his hurt feelings to watch the competition is a good measure of what Olympic involvement means to NHL players.
"I'll probably watch, yeah," Jokinen said before heading home for the break. "It's tough because in Finland there's a big-time difference from here, but I'm going to try to stay on as much Raleigh time as I can so it's easier to come back. I'll watch, obviously. It's still the fun of hockey."
As the NHL inches closer to another labor dispute, the players' love of the Olympics - even including a player such as Jokinen, so unfairly left out - may help prevent another lockout.
For the moment, the NHL is basking in hard-earned labor peace, having given up the 2004-05 season to get it.
Unfortunately, that agreement will expire after next season, although the NHL Players' Association has the right to extend it through 2012 - by which time the perpetually dysfunctional union may finally have hired its fourth executive director since the last negotiations started.
Regardless of the internal turmoil, Olympic participation has been a staple of NHLPA dogma. Perhaps not coincidentally, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has expressed doubts about whether the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, are a good thing for the league.
Since first taking part in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, the NHL has learned that it gets a bigger boost from an Olympics on North American soil - as in Salt Lake City in 2002 or Vancouver this year - than it does when the games are held many time zones away. It takes a pretty big boost to make up for a two-week break in the schedule.
"We have to decide, on balance, 'Is it worth it?' " Bettman said last month.
Sensing a change in the political winds, a few Russian stars - most notably Alex Ovechkin - already have declared their intentions to leave their NHL teams to take part in the Olympics in their homeland.
And while the Russians have national pride at stake, there are many other players who agree the NHL should be there in 2014, particularly the generation that can't remember it any other way.
"The Olympics are one of the competitions you dream about growing up," said Hurricanes forward and Finnish Olympian Tuomo Ruutu. "It would be tough for guys whose only chance would be next time in 2014 if the NHL didn't go. It's something special to play for your country in the Olympics."
The last time the NHL's labor agreement expired, the lack of any common ground for bargaining - the league wanted a salary cap, the NHLPA did not - resulted in the loss of a season. This time around, there's already a give-and-take in place.
In return for continued Olympic participation, the NHL should be able to painlessly extract whatever concessions it needs from the players, who "lost" the last labor negotiations but have made out like bandits over the ensuing five seasons.
That may give Finland a chance to make up for its bizarre exclusion of Jokinen by picking the by-then 30-year-old in 2014.
"The NHL should be there in all the Olympics," Jokinen said. "If you ask the players, 99 percent of them think the NHL should be part of the Olympics. We have to make that happen."
