Hockey is coming back to the Olympics. Finally. After twelve years of watching accountants and Swiss teenagers play for gold, the NHL is sending its best to Milan in 2026. It’s a logistical nightmare, a billion-dollar insurance headache, and a massive middle finger to the Sabres’ front office. But if Team USA wants to do more than just show up and look good in Ralph Lauren, they need to stop overthinking the hardware. They need to play Tage Thompson until his skates melt.

The problem with international hockey is the same problem with enterprise software. Everyone’s afraid of a crash, so they default to the safest, most boring configuration possible. Coaching staffs love "reliable" veterans. They love guys who play a "complete game," which is usually code for players who don’t take risks and definitely don’t score highlight-reel goals from the top of the circle. It’s the hockey equivalent of buying IBM because nobody ever got fired for it.

Thompson is different. He’s an edge case. At 6-foot-6 with the reach of a construction crane and the soft hands of a surgeon, he’s what happens when you max out the power and agility sliders in a character creator and the physics engine somehow fails to break. He isn't just a big body to park in front of the net. He’s a high-bandwidth offensive weapon.

In the 2026 games, the Americans will be tempted to bury him on the third line. They’ll look at the roster—stacked with flashy names from the Rangers and the Devils—and decide Thompson is a "luxury item." That’s a mistake. You don’t buy a top-tier GPU just to run Excel, and you don’t bring a guy with Thompson’s unique specs to Italy just to kill penalties and "provide energy."

There’s a specific friction here, though. The Buffalo Sabres have roughly 50 million reasons to hate this. Thompson is the centerpiece of their entire rebuild, a seven-year investment currently sitting on the books like a load-bearing wall. Every minute he spends on Olympic ice is a minute he could catch a stray puck to the ankle or get run into the boards by a Finnish defenseman with a grudge. For Buffalo, the Olympics isn't a "celebration of sport." It’s a high-stakes gamble with their franchise’s future as the ante.

The trade-off is brutal. If Thompson plays 12 minutes a night in a checking role, he’s less likely to get hurt, but he’s also useless. If he plays 20 minutes and anchors the power play, he might win a gold medal, but he might also come back to Western New York in a walking boot, effectively ending the Sabres’ season before the trade deadline. It’s the kind of risk management that keeps GMs awake at night, staring at spreadsheets and wondering why they didn't just get into real estate.

Most Olympic coaches suffer from a specific kind of "legacy" bloat. They want to play the game the way it was played in 1996—heavy, slow, and grinding. But the international rinks are big. The speed is higher. The latency between a mistake and a goal is non-existent. You need players who can distort the ice. Thompson’s reach alone creates a massive "dead zone" for defenders. He forces the opposition to recalibrate their entire defensive structure just to account for his wingspan.

Leaving him on the bench or limiting his ice time isn't "playing it safe." It’s a waste of resources. It’s like owning a Ferrari and never taking it out of second gear because you’re worried about the tires. If you’re going to pause the NHL season, fly everyone to Europe, and risk the health of your $50 million assets, you might as well try to win the damn thing.

The US roster will be deep, sure. There will be plenty of "gritty" players willing to block shots with their faces. But there is only one Tage Thompson. He is a glitch in the matrix of modern hockey, a physical impossibility that actually works in practice. The coaching staff needs to stop looking at his birth certificate or his "defensive metrics" and start looking at the scoreboard.

We’ve seen this movie before. Team USA gets cute with the lines, tries to be "balanced," and ends up losing to a disciplined European team that knows exactly how to exploit a lack of top-end pressure. If they do it again in Milan, it won’t be because they lacked talent. It’ll be because they had a bazooka in the closet and decided to use a pocketknife instead.

Will they actually give him the minutes? Or will they stick to the "safe" veteran-heavy rotation that’s been failing them for a decade?

It’s a classic tech blunder: prioritizing the process over the results. Let’s see if they’re smart enough to hit the override button.