League leaning against Olympic shutdown

The NHL is likely to skip the Pyeongchang Olympics unless something big changes in the next few months. The league’s owners are still leaning against allowing the world’s top players to participate.

LOS ANGELES >> The NHL is likely to skip the Pyeongchang Olympics unless something big changes in the next few months.

The league’s owners are still leaning against allowing the world’s top hockey players to participate in the Olympics next year, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said Saturday.

In the league’s most strident comments yet on this quadrennial issue, Daly flatly said the NHL’s Board of Governors doesn’t want to shut down the league to allow its players to participate in South Korea. The owners’ minds would have to be changed by something dramatic, but Daly doesn’t know what that new ingredient would be.

“If the status quo remains, I don’t expect us to be in the Olympics,” Daly said.

The league and the International Ice Hockey Federation have no firm deadline to decide whether NHL players will participate in their sixth consecutive Olympics, but the final decision has already been left for later than in previous years.

The parties waited until June 2013 to execute their agreement for the Sochi Games, but the decision was made several months earlier. The NHL prefers to release its yearly schedule in June, which means a final decision might not be made until summer.

While the IIHF has found the money to cover the costs of a Pyeongchang trip after some initial reluctance, the NHL has numerous concerns that aren’t overwhelmed by the excitement of nurturing the game overseas and exposing its biggest investments to injury.

Commissioner Gary Bettman drove the NHL’s decision to participate in its first Olympics in 1998, but the league sees fewer reasons to shut down for three weeks while playing a compressed schedule. Bettman said the issue “got about 10 seconds of discussion” at the board meeting Saturday because nothing has changed.

“I think the realities of Olympic participation are more apparent to our board now, and I think it just leads to less enthusiasm about the disruption,” Daly said. “Quite frankly, we don’t see what the benefit is from ... the league standpoint anyway with respect to league participation, so that’s the challenge. As Gary said numerous times, if there was a compelling reason that we could bring to the board that this is something we should do again in Korea, then we present it to the board and see what they would have to say.”

Daly acknowledged that geography plays a role in the board’s position: Pyeongchang is 14 hours ahead of New York, which will mean difficult game times for viewers in North America. The league also doesn’t anticipate major growth in its game from playing in South Korea.

Skills competition

Big Mike Smith and little Ryker Kesler stole the show at the NHL All-Star Skills Competition.

The towering Arizona goalie scored a 188foot goal during the Four Line Challenge on Saturday night, and the 6-yearold son of Anaheim Ducks center Ryan Kesler scored on Montreal goalie Carey Price during the Shootout.

The Atlantic Division won the overall competition and chose to face the Metropolitan Division on Sunday in the second semifinal period of the All-Star Game, which was changed last year to a 3-on-3 tournament among teams from each of the NHL’s four divisions.

NHL scoring leader Connor McDavid won the Fastest Skater competition, and Montreal defenseman Shea Weber had the hardest shot in the All-Star field for the third consecutive season, albeit with his lowest speed yet. Pittsburgh captain Sidney Crosby won the Accuracy Shooting competition, and he joined Weber and Boston’s Brad Marchand as the only adults to score in the shootout.

The event ended with a shootout competition between the Atlantic and Pacific teams, but just four of the 20 skaters scored. One of them was Ryker, who beat the grinning Price five-hole and celebrated with a two-fisted pump that he learned from his All-Star dad, who filmed him on his phone.

“I was more nervous than him watching,” Ryan Kesler said.

The best early moment belonged to Smith, who lived every goalie’s dream when he shot a puck from the crease into a tiny slot at ice level in the middle of the far net. Before Ryker Kesler seized control of the shootout, Smith’s goal was the most memorable moment of this relaxed Saturday afternoon of annual silliness preceding the game Sunday.

“I didn’t really have a strategy,” Smith said. “I was really focused on just hitting the board, but it kind of curled in at the last second, and I couldn’t believe it, to be honest. I was just as shocked as everyone else.”