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It's a big week for meetings in the NHL.

None bigger, it would seem, than Wednesday in New York. That's when the NHL and all the Olympic hockey stakeholders — outside of the International Olympic Committee, that is — get together to see if there's going to be a last-ditch effort to maintain NHL participation in the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.

The NHL's current position has been well documented. As long as the IOC expects the NHL to “pay for the privilege” — when in each of the five previous Olympics the NHL wasn't responsible for the cost of NHL player participation — the league isn't going.

"I can't imagine the NHL owners are willing to pay for the privilege of shutting down for 17 days," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told attendees of the Prime Time Sports Management Conference in Toronto on Monday morning. “I just don't see that.”

Time is most definitely running out. A deadline of early in the new year has been established for a commitment one way or the other. It certainly looks bleak.

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But you also have to know there's going to be an 11th-hour push by those factions — the International Ice Hockey Federation, led by Rene Fasel; the individual national federations, including Hockey Canada and USA Hockey, amongst others; and the NHL Players' Association — who still see great merit in NHLers playing in the Olympics and think they can find a way around the financial hurdles.

IIHF boss Fasel was quoted Monday as saying, “We have the money to pay the transportation and insurances costs, so I really hope we can focus on the different other issues.”

A variety of other non-NHL stakeholders said this week to not write off NHL participation just yet and that the final push is yet to come.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps.

The closer it gets to that January deadline, the more the pro-Olympic movement will be pushing to cobble together some sort of deal the NHL may be able to live with. It's believed Fasel will be showing up in New York on Wednesday with some sort of makeshift arrangement for the NHL to consider.

Fasel and others have been busy behind the scenes — Fasel met last week with the IOC — trying to come up a financial solution that would appease the NHL. There have been IIHF-led talks with Korean Air to work on a satisfactory and cost-efficient way to get NHL players and their families to and from South Korea.

Altering the NHL mindset won't be easy.

The reality is that even under optimal circumstances, the NHL has only been lukewarm about its players playing in PyeongChang. The IOC asking the NHL to “pay to play” only makes it too easy for the NHL to do what most of its owners wanted to do anyway — stay home.

But let's assume for the moment that Fasel and others come up with some money and logistical plans to address the outstanding issues with the NHL. What then?

Well, never say never, but it's not going to be easy to convince the NHL to get on board.

First, if it's not the IOC making the required financial concessions to get NHLers there, the NHL will view any IIHF-led efforts to cover the costs as a horrible precedent. That is, effectively giving the IOC something for nothing — NHL player participation without shouldering the costs involved. In other words, it's the principle of the thing.

Second, the NHL doesn't like the idea of the IIHF using its funds for something that the IOC should be responsible for, that every IIHF dollar spent on getting NHLers to the Olympics is one less dollar going to real efforts to develop the international game at the grassroots level.

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Fasel may well tell the NHL that's not its concern, that where the money comes from is a moot point so long as the IIHF finds it and it's not coming out of NHL pockets. And having NHL players in PyeongChang is, in fact, a boon to development of hockey throughout the world.

But the truth is the NHL is going to be mightily predisposed to not look favorably on any IIHF concoction.

Unless, of course, the players, via the NHLPA, speak up forcefully.

Historically, it's been the Players' Association that has largely driven NHL participation in the Olympics. The players — those who actually play in the Olympics as well as those who get a two-plus week break in February — have been huge supporters of the Olympic movement.

It's been very difficult for the NHL to say no to the Olympics when the players are so intent on saying yes.

But this year, for a time anyway, it didn't seem as if the players were nearly as keen as they have been in the past.

PyeongChang is a long haul to get to and from. The initial reports from the local organizers were that the players would be housed in PyeongChang's Olympic village but the players' families and friends would be obliged to stay in Seoul, taking high-speed trains back and forth. They would effectively become “commuter fans.”

That separation and distance, it was initially believed, was a reason why many players maybe weren't as excited about the Olympics this time; that the Olympic experience wouldn't be as favorable if their family and friends weren't with them much of the time to share it.

Recently, a joint NHL-NHLPA travel party visited the Olympic site in South Korea, saw firsthand how the train service would work and, according to some accounts, representatives of the NHLPA came away feeling somewhat better about logistics and how it may be received by the players.

So it will be interesting to see what exactly the IIHF may put on the table on Wednesday and how both the NHL and NHLPA react to it.

Another wrinkle is 2022. That's when the Winter Games will be in Beijing and that most definitely is an Olympic venture the NHL will be interested in, for obvious reasons, in terms of the largely untapped and lucrative Chinese marketplace.

For now, it has been the IIHF's position (as espoused to the NHL) that the 2018 and 2022 Winter Olympics are not necessarily linked; that participation, or lack thereof, in the first wouldn't necessarily impact the second.

As long as that remains the case, the NHL going to Pyeongchang would appear a long shot. The NHL is well aware that the moment of truth for 2018 is close at hand and knows there will be an IIHF-led effort this week to find a way to make it happen. For now, we can likely consider the NHL as still skeptical.

Outside the confines of the NHL head office, though, there are a great many Olympic stakeholders who remain hopeful, if not optimistic, that the NHL's Olympic door may not be shut as tightly as it appears. And they'd like to think Wednesday's meeting in New York is the first positive step in that regard.

The Olympic meeting in New York on Wednesday isn't the only get-together of significance.

The NHL-led development consortium — featuring the league, NHLPA, Hockey Canada, USA Hockey, the Canadian Hockey League and the NCAA as well as some player agents — will also be meeting that day in the Big Apple.

This is yet another in a continuing series of meetings led by NHL executive Pat LaFontaine, who has brought all stakeholders together, to review and potentially revamp the North American development model, including the possibility of changing the age of the NHL draft from 18 to 19.

There would be provisions for exceptions, of course, and ultimately nothing happens on this front without approval from the NHLPA as the draft is a collectively bargained item, but the various groups are continuing to work through the nuts and bolts of a "new" system.

The third noteworthy confab of this week is Tuesday, when the NHL general managers get together in Toronto for their annual one-day fall meeting.

This event is a largely a housekeeping session for the NHL Hockey Operations and Player Safety staff, but there's bound to be some talk about the fallout from Toronto Maple Leaf Nazem Kadri's blindside hit on Vancouver Canucks forward Daniel Sedin Nov. 5, which did not result in any supplementary discipline.

To some degree, that re-opened the debate between NHL GMs, some of whom believe the league needs to be more vigilant in penalizing those types of hits. Ultimately, it's a hot-button topic that is more likely to be dealt with at the GMs' spring three-day meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., but it's bound to at least be mentioned now.