Who will win Olympic hockey gold?

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It's safe to say that hockey will be the most watched, and most talked-about, sport at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Italy.

The men's tournament in particular is going to draw a ton of interest as NHL players return for the first time since 2014, giving Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews and many of the league's other young superstars their first taste of the Olympics. A Canada-U.S. clash for the gold medal seems to be in the cards after the bordering rivals' electrifying battles at last year's 4 Nations Face-Off.

On the women's side, another extremely competitive, winner-take-all showdown between Canada and the U.S. feels almost inevitable as the archrival superpowers continue to dominate the world.

So, two Canada-U.S. hockey gold-medal games next month? Yes, please! It's hard to imagine a more exciting outcome than that. But is that the way it will actually play out?

To help gauge the chances, we once again turned to our friends at Shoreview Sports Analytics. Much like they did for our Olympic curling preview last week, the Shoreview guys built a model to predict how each country will do in the men's and women's hockey tournaments. And some of the projections are pretty surprising.

Let's dive in.

Men's

The most surprising things to me here are Canada's relatively low gold-medal chances and the fact that Sweden — not the United States — comes out as the Canadians' top challenger. It's also a bit unexpected to see the Czech Republic ahead of Finland after the Czechs were left out of the 4 Nations Face-Off.

Mainly, though, I'm struck by how tight everything is. The "favourite," Canada, is given just a 37 per cent chance of winning gold.

Without (hopefully) getting too deep in the weeds, I think it's important to lay out the methodology behind these numbers.

As Shoreview's Mike Heenan explains it, his firm started by building a rating for each team using the Elo system, which measures a team's strength based on previous game results. Basically, if you beat an opponent you're expected to beat, your rating goes up a little, and if you upset a stronger foe, your rating goes up a lot. By the same token, when you lose, your rating goes down according to the quality of the team that beat you. It's a fairly simple way to calculate the likelihood of a team winning a head-to-head matchup happening right now.

In order to establish each team's Elo rating, Shoreview used all games played in major, senior-level events (so no world juniors) from 2015 to the present. In this case, that's mostly the annual men's world championship (which includes NHL players) and the last two Olympics (which did not). This decade-long sample provides a pretty good general idea of how good each country is at men's hockey. 

But, as any fan knows, none of those tournaments featured all of the top players from each country. So Shoreview triple-weighted last year's 4 Nations Face-Off — the only true "best on best" event since the 2014 Olympics, and one featuring largely the same rosters that Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Finland will take to the upcoming Games.