NHL puts Olympic decision on ice
Commissioner claims he wants to showcase hockey but he sure has a funny way of showing it
TORONTO — There is always something that sounds a little off when Gary Bettman discusses NHL participation at the Olympics with what amounts to a giant verbal shrug.
But it is all the more incongruous when the commissioner does it at a showcase event for hockey.
On Sunday afternoon, the collision between the NHL trying to grow the sport and yet not trying too hard was on full display at the pre-game ceremonies for the Centennial Classic. Bettman sat at a podium next to the sport’s most famous player and outlined all the things that the NHL is doing in its 100th year to highlight its past and look to its future: a touring exhibition that will visit every NHL market this season, another series of outdoor games, an All-Star Game in Los Angeles that will make good use of Wayne Gretzky and remind everyone of the impact No. 99 had on the NHL’s southern outposts, and the much-ballyhooed 100 Greatest Players list, 33 of whom were unveiled on Sunday with the rest to come on All-Star weekend.
All of it was the league wanting to put its best self on display.
But when talk turned to the Olympics, and the as-yet-unresolved stalemate that has the players very much interested in going to Pyeongchang in 2018 and the league’s owners either not particularly interested in the same or very much interested in bluffing about it, Bettman stayed on his recent course, which was to sound entirely unenthused about the whole deal.
There has been no change from early December, the commissioner said, back when the NHL Players’ Association passed on a league proposal to trade Olympic participation for a three-year extension of the collective bargaining agreement between the players and the owners.
With that idea shot down, Bettman said, “Absent some compelling reason, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of sentiment on the part of the clubs to go through the disruption of taking almost three weeks off in the middle of the season. We’ve been there, done that five times.”
None of this is surprising since it’s a restatement of Bettman’s long-held position on the matter. But then, Bettman was talking at the Centennial Classic, which wouldn’t exist other than the marketing reasons that have caused the NHL to embrace outdoor games in a prolonged hug that long ago became awkward.
The sleepy-then-wild affair between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings at BMO Field was the 20th outdoor game in nine years, with the 21st to be played on Monday in St. Louis. There is a simple reason the league has revisited this well so often. It’s because these games, even though they aren’t as novel as they once were, are still a marquee event for a league that has very few of them.
Bettman said Sunday he expects another three in-the-elements games next season.
The NHL is never going to be the NFL, which only needs to put a good Dallas Cowboys team in prime time to make it a ratings bonanza, and its parity won’t allow it to turn a handful of elite matchups into the showcase that the NBA has developed with its Christmas Day slate.
But outdoor games, with their weird stadiums and the weather and the eye black and the hats with pom poms, are a ready-made way for hockey to feel different and special, and a tour around the BMO Field grounds on Sunday was enough to make even an outdoor-game skeptic admit that fans are still very excited about the concept. Which is why they sell tickets to sporting events in the first place. In the end, a 5-4 overtime win for the Leafs was just the kind of fun game that works on hockey’s rare big stage.
But you know where else hockey feels different and special? Yeah, you do. So do the players, clearly, since they want to be in South Korea — for free — despite the general inconvenience of it being located some distance from this continent. On Sunday, it fell to Donald Fehr of the NHLPA to talk up the merits of growing the game internationally just minutes after the NHL commissioner had been so cool to the idea.
Fehr said he was optimistic a deal to get the players to Pyeongchang could still be reached, although he was vague about the reasons for such optimism. He said he didn’t think the Olympics needed to be tied to CBA talks, which makes sense since the current deal runs through 2022. He said ideally the league and the players could come up with some kind of long-term international-play deal that would incorporate World Cups and Olympics.
“You have to think long-term,” Fehr said, “even if everything isn’t perfect.”
This weekend, at an event held solely to grow the game, Fehr’s was a lonely voice.