A Moving-Picture Analysis of the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off

A film critic’s analysis of the national American broadcasts of the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off, aired between ESPN and TSN.

The 4 Nations Face-Off was bigger than hockey. The political environment surrounding it, led by the annexation rhetoric of President Donald Trump, built the game into a site of geo-political power. But the press conferences and tweets of the president (or Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Treasdu’s responses) weren’t the only things that contributed to meaning-making for at-home viewers of the tournament. The on-screen images and broadcasts themselves were integral to what happened at the 4 Nations Face-Off, arguably even more so than the context of the event. Whether or not we choose to think about them or evaluate what they communicate, the television broadcasts of live sporting events are moving pictures and thus deserve the same kind of analysis we give to other motion pictures.

The most inflaming moment of the tournament—the three fights in the first nine seconds of the USA vs Canada round-robin game—is a fitting place to start. The fights were staged by the three American co-conspirators (Matthew Tkachuk, Brady Tkachuk, and JT Miller) via a pre-game group chat to rev up their team in what they knew would be a hostile environment in the heart of the hockey world: Montreal. (The first half of the tournament took place in Montreal; the second half in Boston.) They were going to fight because it's what these three players wanted to do, and they were committed to doing it no matter what.

Context jettisoned, the event looks different. Alt-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X, “I’ve now become a hockey fan!” followed by three US flag emojis on a repost of a propagandistic video of the game from Barstool Sports.

The video edits fights and goals with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” drowning out any sounds of hockey. It could hardly gain another layer of Americana. While this isn’t strictly from the game broadcast, the employment of the broadcast video by Barstool and Greene reflects the populist meaning-making that occurred during and after the game by American fans: that the fights were a direct result of the booing of the “Star Spangled Banner” that took place during the pre-game ceremony.

If you throw out the context of the group chat and the nature of hockey fights anyway (to energize your team rather than punish fans for booing), reading the images together this way actually makes sense. When the images (and sounds) of the booing, followed by the powerful moment of democratic unity of the masses of the arena singing their hearts out to "Oh Canada," meet the images of the three fights to kick off the game, the viewer is left with no choice but to interpret the latter as a response to the former.

Cinema has known this since Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s described the effects of shots making meaning together rather than in isolation. Take the below images as an example: how you interpret the same facial expression in these two different sequences is dependent on the middle image and what you determine is being communicated. Most viewers will find hunger in the first row and lust in the second.

While the broadcast in the US wasn’t using the same intentionality in the images they displayed (nor could they control the on-ice product in any way), none of that matters to the viewer or how they make sense of what is before them. How else are the following two audio-visual images to be interpreted? Even with a few minutes of related images between the two (and thus not a straightforward application of the Kuleshov effect properly understood), the psychological import of both encourages the two to be read in near-direct succession.

This meaning was at least in part an accident of circumstance. The same can’t be said for the final game, In the rematch of USA vs Canada (on ESPN) for the championship, the nationalism of the broadcast reached unmistakable heights. Very early, possibly even the opening sequence of the pre-game activities, they aired a re-edit of the famous Herb Brooks speech in Miracle where the locker room consisted of the 2025 Team USA instead of the 1980 one. Little separates this in-house promo from TikTok fan-edits other than who officially sanctioned it.

Of course, as an ice hockey analogy, the video makes no sense. The 1980 USSR team was a dominant international powerhouse—one of the most dominant teams in international hockey history—and Team USA was composed of amateur athletes. The betting line ahead of the present game had both teams at an even -110. Team USA even won the round-robin a few days before, defeating the “if we played them 10 times, they might win nine. But not tonight” line from Brooks’ famed speech.

It’s all about nationalism, not hockey. Mike Eruzione, one of the heroes from that team, had been featured prominently in Team USA pre-game activities and pre-game material, further linking the two iterations of Team USA, along with the new jersey design that better recalls the 1980 jerseys than the other recent official team sweaters. The makers of the trailer know their audience and they know that Americans in general, but especially hockey-playing Americans, adore and find inspiration in that story of triumph over the USSR and that film more than almost any other hockey event or hockey film. The trailer mobilizes the audience's feelings for Miracle and turns them from the Soviet Union (a colonial empire and long-standing political enemy) and to Canada (our greatest ally and closest neighbor).

There’s another reason for the edited trailer though. The above ESPN X post clarifies the capitalistic forces catalyzing the rousing, though cheap, edit: free marketing for another product owned by the same parent corporation. Part of the X post’s caption reads, “🏒 ‘Miracle’ starring Kurt Russell now streaming on Disney+”.

Nationalism and ad-centric capitalism link from the start of the broadcast (and even the tournament) and play throughout. From the ads on the team uniforms (CAT and Discover for Team USA) to the ads on the boards, viewers are fed advertisements the whole game, a game that pauses a few times a period for “TV timeouts” to give viewers a break from the hockey with their advertisements. As viewers support and cheer for their team, they will naturally feel good at the sight of the jerseys — and, through a butterfly effect, for the sponsors. National pride and corporate simping become inseparable.

The digitally alternating ads along the boards differ from the permanent ones in the arena that viewers occasionally glimpse when angles (or replays) hinder the technology from projecting the ads onto the boards without slowing the broadcast. In the final, a few of the notable ads included a men’s butt wipe product, sports betting, and, most interesting to me, a Prince Edwards Island tourism advertisement.

The game took place in Boston, MA, not too far geographically speaking, but the political significance of the ad felt not too far removed from the Ontario commercial in the Super Bowl: a temptation to American liberals, who see Canada as a more desirable place to live, and an assertion of soft power aimed at American political actors. “Hey Americans, come to Canada!” reads the unspoken words lighting up the boards. The geographical proximity (and economic relevance) of New England to PEI can’t be the motivating factor for the ad placement either since the ad would have only been visible to television viewers. The ads on the boards visible to fans attending the game are static and usually target a more local market.

Charged symbols were as inescapable as the inevitably of violence. Wayne Gretzky, the undisputed greatest hockey player of all time and a beloved icon of the game, was Team Canada’s honorary captain. He is more or less the symbol of hockey. His presence is akin to a cameo in a Marvel movie: it gives the viewers (regardless of nationality) what they want, and theoretically makes it harder to boo the anthem to follow (in this case, the Canadian anthem since the game was in Boston). Canada did something similar when the game was in Montreal, though unsuccessful, by having a Canadian military veteran sing the American anthem. Other key symbols include flags all over the stands, a satirically inciting “11th province sign” an eager fan behind one of the benches trying to parade his MAGA hat to the camera, and, on a more somber note, the jersey and family of Johnny Gaudreau, an American NHL superstar tragically killed along with his brother by a drunk driver last summer. Each of these symbols—and others—carry more weight than any viewer can possibly discern or any critic can possibly unpack. This is even more true when they remain unobserved. They provide the context and mental cues for our brains (and emotions) to make sense of the televised sporting event.

Like superhero films, international competitions create heroes. The hero of this tournament was Connor McDavid, Team Canada’s top center and likely the world’s best active player. He scored the game-winner in sudden-death overtime and instantly jumped in amazed disbelief. The team erupts into jubilant pandemonium and the audience makes all sorts of noises. Team Canada swarms him like worker bees around their queen, the maple leaf on their chest bobbing up and down making a difficult job for the videographers. Their celebratory bodies smash against one another with a heroic focal point in the middle. The unstable camera celebrates with Team Canada and stays a bit more at a remove from the sulking Americans; the Canadian SportsNet broadcast emphasizes this disparity even more.

If one wants to take this to its most absurd conclusion, some context on the moment’s hero is needed. McDavid, because of his alienating talent, has jokingly picked up the nickname “McJesus.” That makes this his salvific delivery to Canada. And given the tense and fraught political climate of the two countries, the goal is closer to war heroism than the typical McDavid highlight reel. Trudeau solidified the collective patriotism with his post on X immediately after the victory the goal ensured: “You can't take our country — and you can't take our game.” Popular BluSky account ArtButMakeItSports exaggerates the heroic imagery and takes it to its extreme conclusion:

Regardless of what one wants to read into the images here, the combination of McDavid’s on-ice talent, the goal, and the images made him the hero of the moment.

One of the great symbols of hockey is the handshake line, a staple of any international tournament, and this 4 Nations Face-Off was no different. At the end of the game, the two teams line up single file, shake hands, and exchange (usually) words of respect. As they did so here, the camera abandoned a birds-eye view and approached their level. Viewers were made equal with the players (and, thus better able to empathize or imagine themselves in the skates of the players). The new, closer perspective makes it so that the bodies of the players take up most of the frame instead of the beautiful wide-open white ice that normally controls the frame. Their bodies, and especially the shared colors red and white, merge and lose themselves in one another. The colors just work well together. They shake hands and for a moment their bodies extend into one mass. Brad Marchand (Canada, #63) shakes hands with Noah Hanafin (USA, #15) and the two players’ hands can hardly be distinguished. This is not too different from the way a good director can use dance (or, more nerdily, stylistic choices like step-printing in the films of Wong Kar-wai). A photographic still doesn’t do the scene justice either. With one team moving right across the screen and the other left, the motion and the weaving in and out of our viewpoint create a visual reasonably interpreted as unifying.

I want to conclude with how ESPN began. The pre-game opening trailer, like an overture, set the scene for the game (for viewers at home). The NHL often crops recorded game broadcasts and adds letterboxing to them (the “black bars on the bottom”) to add a cinematic flare to their already entertaining product. The tone they desire, it would seem, has more gravitas by being cinematic. They would never taint the live game with this incomplete image though. It’s only for the fan hype trailers that remind viewers of their best and worst moments as lovers of the game. The video (focusing on the game’s biggest stars) they made for the 4 Nations Face-Off stitches together Canadian and USA hockey history, playing to each country’s respective primal nationalistic urges while also pulling their two histories into one larger narrative: the history of hockey.

As Francis Ford Coppola said, “The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images, images of people during emotional moments, or just images in a general sense, but put together in a kind of alchemy.” If those images can be alchemy, we would do better to pay attention to them. And that includes live sports broadcasts that we usually watch with our feet elevated, a beer in hand, and holding our emotions close to our chest.