Global Series Sweden provides teammates unique overseas bonding experience

When Zdeno Chara is asked about Ireland, about the Czech Republic, about the 2010-11 Boston Bruins and the antics they got up to on their season-opening trip overseas, he breaks into a wide grin.

There were no curfews, he admits. No real limits.

So what happened?

“You can’t print it,” he said, through laughter. “It was too many of them. It was almost daily, like there was something almost daily. I think at one point (coach) Claude (Julien) must have said something like, ‘OK, guys, let’s smarten up.’”

There is a twinkle in his eye as he says it, even if he won’t divulge any actual stories. But it’s clear as he describes that trip that there was something special about the time the team spent together out of their usual spaces, out of Boston, out of TD Garden, out of the norm of their hockey lives.

That Bruins team would go on to win the Stanley Cup.

They’re not alone. Since 2008-09, when the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Detroit Red Wings to win the Cup, after traveling to Stockholm, Sweden to start the season, in the 10 seasons in which the NHL has played regular-season games overseas, six times one of those teams has gone on to lift the Cup. And that doesn’t count the 2018-19 Bruins, who began the season with preseason games in China and made it to Game 7 before bowing to the St. Louis Blues.

Perhaps there’s a little magic in these trips.

It’s something the Nashville Predators and Pittsburgh Penguins will see for themselves when they face off in Stockholm at the 2025 NHL Global Series Sweden presented by Fastenal, with games taking place at Avicii Arena on Friday (2 p.m. ET; FDSNSO, SN-PIT, NHLN, SN) and Sunday (9 a.m. ET; FDSNSO, SN-PIT, NHLN, SN).

“I think there’s a long-term payoff there, with the bonding,” Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “The context of bonding is critically important. So if you go to the same restaurant, you sit in the same seats every day, your whole team, yeah, they’re together, but you need actually the context to change, to change and reinforce, maybe create new bonds, new friendships, or just a better sense of connection, and that’s a major change in context. So it makes the bonding different, I believe.”

His Panthers, who played in the Global Series last season against the Dallas Stars in Tampere, Finland, went on to win the Stanley Cup for the second consecutive season.

Besides those Penguins, the Chicago Blackhawks played in the 2009 Premiere Series in Switzerland and Finland, the Bruins played in the 2010 Premiere Series in Ireland and Czechia, the Los Angeles Kings played in the 2011 Premiere Series in Germany, the Tampa Bay Lightning played in the 2019 Global Series in Sweden before going on to win the Stanley Cup, in addition to last season’s Panthers, who also won the Cup.

“It’s out of the routine because once the season does start you do get into your routines like, ‘All right we’re going to Chicago, OK, we’ll hit up Whole Foods, grab some food, take it back to the room, hang out, talk, go to bed at 9, wake up for the game,’” said Andrew Ference, a defenseman on that Bruins team. “It’s a life of repetition. It’s not boring, but it’s scheduled and a bit rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, so anything to throw it out of the normal is incredible.”

The moments are different on every trip.

There was the jaunt to “sauna island” for the Panthers last season, when the team took a boat to a secluded island, winter jackets on, only to spend the day in the sauna and swimming in the Baltic Sea.

There was the padel tournament organized by Ottawa Senators assistant coach Daniel Alfredsson, part of why defenseman Jake Sanderson called their trip to Stockholm “my favorite trip throughout my whole career.”

There was the scavenger hunt around Stockholm the Penguins did in 2008, taking them all over the city in teams of four, all documented on point-and-shoot cameras.

There was karaoke in China for the Bruins, beers on the top of the Great Wall.

“We had a blast,” Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy said of the team’s 2018 trip to Beijing and Shenzen, China. “We knew we were there to play some games, have some practices, but really we used it as an opportunity to bond, a lot, off the ice. Everything we did, we tried to do it together. And that was really where it was ideal for us.”

In some cities, there’s the added attraction of family time, getting to meet the parents and grandparents, friends and coaches, of teammates. That was the case for William Nylander when the Toronto Maple Leafs went to Stockholm in 2023, when he had a three-point game against the Detroit Red Wings in front of his grandmother, who had never seen him play live.

It will be the case for Predators forward Filip Forsberg and defenseman Adam Wilsby and Penguins defenseman Erik Karlsson, all of them Sweden natives.

But it’s truly the moments that teams spend together, touring cities, visiting museums, eating unfamiliar food, that provide the fodder that can bind them together for a season or forever.

“It’s nothing that you wouldn’t do as a normal tourist, just going on a vacation with your family or friends or something like that,” Ference said. “We pretty much did the same stuff that other people would do. It’s just that you never do that with your teammates. You never get to have a vacation with your teammates where you go to the torture museum in Prague, just random stuff, let’s check out the clock tower.”

It is, at its core, a buddy trip. A guys trip. It’s the kind of trip that so many hockey players were too busy to take coming up, the antidote to the regimented routine of their usual road trips to Detroit or Toronto or Dallas.

In Stockholm or Tampere, Shenzen or Prague, it’s far different.

“We go to cities and you’re, typically, you know, hotel, rink, go eat,” said Sidney Crosby, who will play in Stockholm for the second time in his career this week. “You don’t get a ton of time to see the actual city. So, getting the opportunity to go to Stockholm and see the city and learn about it and the history, and things like that, made it even better of a trip to be able to experience that.”

And in those moments, memories are born.

Memories that can bring a team together, that get brought up and laughed about all season, memories that tighten bonds and create camaraderie, memories that contribute to a sense of shared time and shared purpose.

“The season’s long and so to have content that can get you through an entire year of just making fun of people or dumb things that happened or funny things that happened -- if there’s anybody that’s good at retelling a story it’s probably athletes in a locker room,” Ference said. “Retell that same story 8,000 times and it gradually gets better over the course of the year, but yeah, you need content. … It’s gold.”

It's there, in the way that Crosby brings up that trip to Stockholm as part of what prepared them for the playoffs. It’s there in the way Chara chuckles in recall of his team’s time overseas and the shenanigans that occurred. It’s there in the way Anton Lundell beams when talking about how much his teammates enjoyed experiencing a real Finnish sauna.

It’s there in what happened to so many of the teams months later when the biggest moments of the season came around.

“You put everybody in a new place, somewhere no one’s ever been, and it was kind of like you’ve got to lean on each other to -- not survive, that’s dramatic -- but more just to get through it together,” McAvoy said. “You’re going to lean on those people to get through it.”

Just like you do in, say, the Stanley Cup Playoffs. There’s a reference to Sweden on the Lightning’s 2020 Cup rings, which includes the word “Stockholm.”

“It was a pretty much similar situation, we were on the road, we ended in New York, flew over to Sweden,” said Predators forward Steven Stamkos, who was Lightning captain then. “We were all complaining about being in the middle of a road trip and having to go in the middle of the season and games and condensed schedule and flight and all that stuff.

“And then we got there, I think we had like four or five days before we played and we made the most of it. We had so much fun together as a team. It wasn’t like a come-to-Jesus type of moment; it was just the guys. Not often are you in that situation where everyone’s on the same schedule -- we’re in a different country, we’re doing everything together, we’re having fun nights out together, we’re doing dinner together for five straight nights before the first game. And we went, we won those two games, and it was kind of like a springboard to bigger and better things for our group. So obviously we won that year and we thought that that was a big moment in the season. It was early, but we thought that was a big moment and deserved to be a piece of the history that we remember of that season. … We put a little memento on the ring to just signify how special that trip was for our group.”

NHL.com senior writer Tom Gulitti, NHL.com senior draft writer Mike Morreale, NHL.com staff writer Mike Zeisberger and NHL.com independent correspondent Wes Crosby contributed to this report.