World Cup seen as not just a one-time event
Potential hosts have contacted NHL about tourney, say Bettman, Fehr
Get comfy, fall hard for TORONTO that best-on-best buzz, because, barring a massive change in plans it appears the World Cup of Hockey will be a cyclical event for the foreseeable future.
The league already is getting expressions of interest from parties hoping to latch on to the NHL/ NHLPA-run spectacle — rebooted, re-imagined, re-branded after a 12year absence — for its (probable) second instalment in 2020.
“There have been a whole lot of people who have been interested in participating (in a hosting capacity). And what we’ve told everyone is that after this one is over we’re going to take a hard look,” NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr said Friday.
“We’re going to do, as you would expect, some real evaluations, make some judgments as to when and where, whether we want to try and select a city and negotiate the way we did this time, whether we want to bid, whether we want to do it all in one place or spread it around. So, we’ll see.”
Commissioner Gary Bettman, who joined Fehr on a hockey business panel at a Toronto hotel on the eve of the tournament’s first games, echoed Fehr’s vision.
“Our plan is to have this, or our intention is to have this (event), on a regular basis,” Bettman said, “perhaps every four years.”
VIVA LAS VEGAS
The NHL is heading to Las Vegas for the 2017-18 season and being the first major pro sports league in Sin City is a point of pride, too, with Bettman boasting about the NHL’s grasp of the market and its quirks.
“I think, part of the issue is, I’m not sure the other leagues understand Las Vegas as we have come to understand it,” he said. “There are 2.1 million people in Greater Las Vegas. They are, for the most part, not what you see on the strip when you go there and visit for a weekend. There are communities, there are families who put their kids in school, and they’re looking for the same things that you get in other cities.”
On Thursday, $750 million in Nevada public money was recommended to be approved for a stadium-building project. Nothing happens overnight, of course, but the NHL may, one day, have company.
“We’ll be fine in Vegas,” Bettman said when asked to react to the NFL’s interest in the city. “I have no idea what the NFL is going to do and it has no impact on our plans.”
Meanwhile, the NHL franchise’s moniker is still a work in progress.
The smart money appears to be on the Vegas team adopting a nickname focused around the word “Knights” — think Silver Knights, Golden Knights or Desert Knights.
Bettman says there has been no firm timeline extended to Bill Foley, the club’s majority owner, to announcing a name.
JERSEY ADS TO DEBUT
A benefit of hosting a half-gimmick, half-serious event like the World Cup is that new revenuegenerating initiatives can be rolled out without protest.
For this tournament, the NHL/ NHLPA has embarked upon jersey advertisements (small patches rented out by SAP software company) and digitally enhanced dasher boards (esthetically pleasing ads).
Both money makers have been billed as experiments.
“So far there hasn’t been any negative reaction to me. It wouldn’t surprise me if some people had some reactions to it, because it’s fundamentally non-traditional,” Fehr said of the jersey ads. “That being said, the players, and everybody else, are in the modern world and none of the sports look the way they did 25 (or) 50 years ago. You have to adapt on an ongoing basis.”
Fehr is spot-on in his outlook. The NHLPA’s membership is hundreds deep, so the presumed baby step toward commercializing NHL sweaters obviously won’t be praised universally.
Team USA forward Blake Wheeler, an initial critic of the ads, may have softened his view.
“I think there’s ways to do it without tarnishing kind of the look of the jerseys,” Wheeler said Friday. “Hopefully there can be a good balance.”