Personally, I'm blaming Kim Jong Un for this.
Pyeongchang is two and a half hours from the border of North Korea. The NHL owners were concerned about losing a star player to an injury. Set aside all the growing the game stuff, nationalism, the desire to see awesome hockey etc - it would take longer to drive to Edmonton than it would to drive from the Olympic host city to a rogue nuclear state.
They'll never come out and say it, but that has to have weighed heavy on the minds of decision makers. And I don't know that I'd risk $500M+ worth of star players when it's impossible to guarantee that fat bowl cut keeps to his own sandbox.
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