The Athletic has live coverage of Canada vs Sweden in the 4 Nations Face-Off
Welcome to our 4 Nations Face-Off projections, where you will find each country’s rosters with projected values, chances of winning each game and their chances of winning the tournament. All projections are rounded to the nearest whole number. You can read more about the model at the bottom of the page. The projections will be updated after each game.
Last updated: February 11, 2025, 9:45 a.m. EST
Rosters
Methodology
Starting at the player level, we create a projected Offensive Rating and Defensive Rating for each player — a linear weight model that combines each player’s production and play-driving ability using various box-score and on-ice metrics. That projection is based on the player’s performance in each metric over the last three seasons (five for goalies), weighted for recency where more recent seasons carry more significance and regressed to the mean. That rating is then adjusted for the contextual usage of who they play with and against on average. Each player’s ability is measured on a per-minute basis for each game state (five-on-five, power play and penalty kill) which is then applied to an ice-time projection based on each player’s expected role at the tournament. From there, an Offensive and Defensive Rating is created for each player on the roster and then combined to form team ratings.
Those ratings create an estimate of how many goals each team is expected to score and allow in a game against an average opponent at a neutral site. We then assign a probability of how likely a team is to win a given game by accounting for opponent strength as well as home ice advantage for any games that Canada plays in Montreal and USA plays in Boston. The team ratings are then adjusted further based on how the results from the tournament compare to the forecast. Taking into account each team’s current record and remaining schedule, we use these game-by-game projections to simulate the rest of the tournament 50,000 times using the Monte Carlo method.
(Photo: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)
