Olympic regrets? Not at all
Bettman unrepentant about NHL’s decision to skip 2018 Games
TORONTO — Gord Miller was in the middle of asking a question about NHL hockey and the Olympics when Gary Bettman cut him off.
“Why are we beating a dead horse about this?” the commissioner said. “I mean, it’s come and gone, we already made the decision. We’re not going.”
It was the only moment of frostiness between the TSN host and the hockey boss in their annual conversation at the PrimeTime Sports Management Conference, which takes place this week at a downtown Toronto hotel. And the moment came after Bettman had answered several Olympics-related questions: he had no regrets at all about not going, the big stumbling block was the disruption to the NHL season, and it remained a sore point that the league was never allowed to associate itself with the Olympics even when its clubs loaned their star athletes to the five-ring spectacle.
But if Bettman was eventually exasperated by the fact that there continues to be so much discussion about the NHL’s non-participation in the Olympics, he might want to consider the reason for that: because people still can’t believe that the NHL has gone and done it. The point is driven home when the NHL sends teams to Sweden for regular-season games, as it just did, or to China for pre-season games, as it did months ago, with the stated goal of growing the sport of hockey internationally. The decision is underscored when Canada releases a men’s roster for a pre-Olympic tournament that includes Rob Klinkhammer and Quinton Howden, or Team USA does the same with names like Chad Billins and Broc Little. (Note: No ‘k’.)
And the NHL’s recusal from what had become the quadrennial can’tmiss best-on-best tournament is pondered when the highlight shows are dominated by players like Nikita Kucherov, Connor McDavid, and Auston Matthews, all of whom were ready to usher in a new era of elite play for their countries at the Olympic level. If, you know, the NHL had let them.
To hear Bettman tell it, as he has said for some time, none of this was worth the NHL going to Pyeongchang 2018. Also in keeping with the league’s position of more than a year, the explanation for the NHL’s reluctance was a bit fluid on Monday. Bettman said there was at one point a handful of clubs that were keen on Olympic participation and a “bigger handful” that didn’t want the disruption, with a big group in the middle that was on the fence. He said that group became annoyed when the International Olympic Committee let it be known that they would not cover the travel and insurance expenses of NHL players this time around. Bettman said the attitude among many clubs quickly became: “If they don’t value our participation, why are we disrupting our season?”
But the commissioner also said that the expense problem, which might ultimately have been resolved, was not the deal-breaker. “The No. 1 overriding issue is how disruptive it is to our season and the fact that we would disappear for roughly three weeks in February,” he said.
So, were owners really mad about the expense thing — Bettman did suggest it was the turning point — or was that just a convenient scapegoat to hide the fact that the NHL had fallen out of love with the Olympic experience?
I will take door No. 2, in part because