The National Hockey League announced Friday that it would add a break to its 2021-22 schedule to clear the way for its players to participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics as part of an agreement with the International Ice Hockey Federation. 

That will likely make the Beijing Olympics the first since 2014 to feature professional skaters from the top North American league. 

But it’s not quite a done deal because of the ongoing pandemic: the NHL and NHLPA kept the door open for “the possibility of a later decision to withdraw” from the Olympics if the health conditions are deemed “impractical or unsafe.”

The local organizing committee in Beijing hasn’t yet outlined the health protocols that athletes will be expected to abide by during the Games, which take place from Feb. 4-20, 2022. Olympians in Tokyo were subject to a litany of regulations, including masking, social distancing and daily Covid-19 testing, but vaccinations weren’t mandated.

Although the pandemic may yet derail the NHL’s return to the Olympics, it is also part of the reason why professional skaters are headed back there at all. During the league’s extended pause during the spring and summer of 2020, collective bargaining agreement negotiations on restarting the 2019-20 season turned into a slugfest. As part of the agreement to continue the season at two sites in Canada, the league signaled it was open to letting players participate in the 2022 Olympics.

The Olympics are popular with players, but less so with league executives because of the scheduling disruptions they caused. The NHL prevented players from participating in the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea, a move that was widely panned by skaters.

“We understand how passionately NHL players feel about representing and competing for the countries,” said NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly this week. “We are very pleased that we were able to conclude arrangements that will allow them to resume best-on-best on the Olympic stage.”

The NHL has a checkered history with the Olympics. Before 1986, the International Olympic Committee didn’t allow professional athletes to participate in the Games. It’s why the United States’ “Miracle on Ice” team that defeated the Soviet Union en route to gold at the 1980 Olympics was a ragtag group of college players, mostly from Massachusetts and Minnesota.

The NHL first allowed players to participate in the 1988 Calgary Games, but few did given that the Olympics tournament overlapped with the tail end of the NHL regular season, when teams vie for playoff berths and seeding. It wasn’t until 1995 that the league reached an agreement with international hockey governing bodies and the NHL Players’ Association to pause the season to allow NHL players to represent their countries at the Olympics.

While the Olympics break created a tidy solution for the IOC, Commissioner Gary Bettman found that it threw a wrench into the NHL season. Every team got about two weeks off of competition, but not every roster got equal rest. The teams with the most talent ended up faring the worst: the more players you sent to the Olympics, the more banged up players filled out the bench at the end of the NHL’s hiatus.

Bettman complained that abruptly pausing games mid-season took a toll on players and fans. As early as 2006, following the league’s lost lockout season in 2004-05, Bettman lobbied for the Olympics to go on without NHL players. Nevertheless, the league and the NHLPA agreed to allow skaters to participate in the Vancouver and Sochi Games.

Russians playing under the name Olympic Athletes from Russia won gold at the 2018 Olympics, which didn’t include NHL players.

Photo: grigory dukor/Reuters

In 2017, the NHL and NHLPA jointly announced that they would not participate in the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. Bettman said at the time that “the benefits we get tend to be greater when the Olympics are in North America than when they’re in distant time zones.”

The hockey tournament in South Korea was marred by its absence of star players; the majority of the U.S. roster was a mix of up-and-coming players in the minors or college and former NHL players past their primes. The U.S. team failed to medal, falling to the Czech Republic in the second round of the elimination bracket.

Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com