Team Canada leaned heavily on its championship-winning experience at the 4 Nations Face-Off when selecting the roster for the Milan Cortina Olympics, naming 19 returning players Wednesday for the Games in Italy.

That includes the same eight defensemen who represented the national team last February, plus starting goaltender Jordan Binnington, who was superb in the 3-2 overtime victory over the U.S. in the championship game.

Among the 10 returning forwards are the NHL’s current top two scorers — Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon — plus six others with a Stanley Cup on their resume: Sidney Crosby, Sam Reinhart, Brad Marchand, Anthony Cirelli, Brayden Point and Mark Stone.

Mitch Marner, who assisted on McDavid’s overtime-clinching goal at 4 Nations, and Brandon Hagel are the other returnees.

“We believe this is the best team we could select,” said Team Canada GM Doug Armstrong. “There’s a lot of aspects that go into the team. You look at Hagel and Cirelli’s penalty killing — it’s exemplary in the NHL, and that’s an area that we wanted to make sure (we addressed). There’s not going to be a lot of power plays, but a power-play goal will count even higher because there’s not that many.”

Even with two extra roster spots available for February’s Olympic tournament, the debate on final roster choices among Doug Armstrong’s management staff went down to the wire. They made the biggest changes at forward — dropping Sam Bennett, Seth Jarvis and Travis Konecny from the 4 Nations roster to make room for newcomers Tom Wilson, Nick Suzuki, Bo Horvat and 19-year-old Macklin Celebrini, who stands to become the youngest men’s player ever to represent Canada at an Olympics featuring NHLers.

In goal, Logan Thompson and Darcy Kuemper earned a trip to Milan in place of Adin Hill and Samuel Montembeault.

Of particular note is the fact that Crosby and Drew Doughty will be chasing their third Olympic gold medal after winning previously with Canada in 2010 and 2014.

Full roster

Snubs

Canada has an embarrassment of riches at forward and left off some of the NHL’s most productive forwards this season: Connor Bedard (1.42 points per game), Mark Scheifele (1.22 ppg) and Wyatt Johnston (1.15 ppg), most notable among them.

Those represent breakout campaigns for Bedard and Johnston, who will almost certainly be part of Canada’s Olympic team in 2030.

The same can be said of 18-year-old defenseman Matthew Schaefer. The No. 1 pick from the 2025 NHL Draft wasn’t on anyone’s radar as a possible selection in the summer, but forced his way into the conversation with an electric start to his professional career with the New York Islanders.

“I’ll be honest with you — he wasn’t on my radar at the start of the season,” Armstrong said of Schaefer. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about players who didn’t make the team, but to me this is a special (exception) because he’s an 18-year-old man that we’re talking about playing at the Olympics.