NHL 22 getting IIHF World Juniors, women’s & men’s World Championships

NHL 22Electronic Arts has announced that the sport will be expanding both in terms of gender and globalization, starting on Thursday with the introduction of the International Ice Hockey Federation’s World Junior Championship, as well as the World Championship tournaments, for men and women.

The IIHF is the governing body of ice hockey all over the globe, holding multiple annual tournaments featuring national teams from around the world; it also oversees the sport’s presence at the Olympics. With EA having secured IIHF licensing, the organization’s logos and uniforms will appear in NHL 22.

Thursday’s NHL 22Update introduces World Juniors, an international tournament that is a perennial favorite for younger players than 20 years old. Online modes World of Chel, Hockey Ultimate Team and World of Chel will allow you to view federations, logos and uniforms. You can access the teams in Play Now mode using the rosters of the last tournament. These will be updated as new rosters are announced later in the month. (The 2022 World Juniors begin Dec. 26 and national teams have not yet announced their squads.

The men’s and women’s World Championship tournaments will both arrive in NHL 22 in January 2022, according to EA’s website.

The company highlighted two well-known stars of the women’s game in a news release: Hilary Knight, who won a gold medal with Team USA at the 2018 Winter Olympics, and Hockey Canada captain Marie-Philip Poulin, gold medalist at the Olympics in 2010 and 2014 and at the 2021 IIHF Women’s World Championship. These two will be featured in NHL 22as part of rosters for 2021 tournament. This was in August. This will mark the first time that full women’s hockey teams — with official licensing for the IIHF and national teams — have been playable in a video game. (Team Canada’s Hayley Wickenheiser and Team USA’s Angela Ruggiero did appear in NHL 13 as playable “legends,” but it was just the two of them, not teams. It has been possible to create a female player in the career mode, Be a Pro, since 2011’s NHL 12.)

“The introduction of women’s national teams to NHL 22 as part of the upcoming IIHF content will be an important moment for the franchise in its continued effort to reflect the diversity of the hockey community,” said Sean Ramjagsingh, vice president and general manager for hockey at EA Sports, in the news release. “We are proud to feature playable women’s teams for the first time in NHL 22, alongside the rising stars on the World Juniors teams.”

It’s worth noting that the rosters for all three IIHF tournaments — the World Juniors, and the men’s and women’s World Championships — will likely end up being incomplete in NHL 22. While these tournaments feature many of the world’s top hockey players, eligible athletes who are currently playing in the NHL often do not compete in them, since they overlap with the NHL regular season (World Juniors) and playoffs (men’s World Championship). Instead, a number of the players on IIHF tournament rosters — for both men’s and women’s teams — come from college hockey. And they won’t appear in NHL 22This is likely to be due to ever-changing compensation rules for college athletes.

“There will no NCAA players at this point, but we’ll be working closely with the IIHF in regards to having the most up to date rosters as possible,” a representative for EA Sports told Polygon.

Grid View

Updates to the IIHF NHL 22EA will release content for World of Chel, HUT, and World of Chel that features many of the biggest names of today’s NHL. You can unlock the jerseys from the 2022 World Juniors in EA’s game. HUT players who log in from Thursday through Jan. 10, 2022, will be awarded a card for the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Auston Matthews — who has already been named to Team USA’s squad for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — as well as a uniform pack.

A batch of screenshots that EA released for Thursday’s announcement features players such as Colorado Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog (who will play for Team Sweden at the Winter Olympics) and the New York Rangers’ Alexis Lafrenière (who won gold with Team Canada at the 2020 World Juniors, but has not yet been confirmed for the Olympics).

Thursday’s update for NHL 22Two long-awaited new features have been added: The ability to transfer HUT content to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions, as well as the ability to share and create custom rosters.