Gary Bettman

Gary Bettman, who became the NHL’s first commissioner nine years ago today, has had an active tenure. He brought a badly needed business sense to the league but has been criticized for supposedly not having a feel for the game. During his reign, two teams left Canada--the cradle of hockey--and the NHL has expanded or transferred teams to non-traditional cities in the Sunbelt and West. Player salaries have more than tripled, to an average of about $1.4 million, but the NHL in 1994-95 experienced its first prolonged work stoppage, a 102-day lockout.

And under Bettman’s leadership, the NHL for the first time halted play to allow players to represent their homelands in the 1998 Olympic hockey tournament at Nagano, taking a 17-day hiatus. For the Salt Lake City Winter Games, it will take a 12-day break starting Feb. 14. The Olympics will be often discussed during this weekend’s All-Star activities, which Bettman estimated will touch 200,000 people.

“There’s a real buzz around this game because it’s a good jumping-off point, both for the second half of the season and for the Olympics,” Bettman said.

Here are excerpts from an interview Bettman did with The Times:

Q: At this point, everybody is looking to the Olympics and the Olympic teams. The relationship between the NHL and the Olympics--is it beneficial? Not beneficial? How would you describe it?

A: We go to the Olympics because this is a sport that has a great history and tradition of international competition dating back to the Canada Cups [tournaments in the 1970s] and because our fans and our players like it.

I saw a piece of research that said something like 80% of what I’d call our strong fans think going to the Olympics is a good thing to do. We think that by working with the International Ice Hockey Federation to make this a reality and putting the best hockey players in the world on the world stage representing their countries, we will continue together to grow the game.

Q: What about your owners [who were lukewarm about the first Olympic participation]? How do they feel?

A: More owners than not think this is a good thing to do. Even the owners that have concerns understand the reasons for doing it, and so we do it because on balance it appears to be the right thing to do.

Q: Does the NHL’s agreement go beyond this Olympics?

A: We’re going to do this Olympics and we’re going to do a World Cup in the summer of ’04.

Q: Would any participation in the next Olympics be part of the next collective bargaining agreement?

A: We have made it a practice to deal with our Olympic and World Cup schedule as ongoing discussions. And when I get asked the question now, ‘Will we do it again?’ it’s the same question I got asked four years ago before the Olympics and I said when we finish the cycle [of the Olympics and World Cup] we will sit with the players’ association and reason together as to what we want to do next. Although my guess is we’re going to have to make a decision on the [2006] Olympics before ’04 because we’ll need more time. We have to go through the experience, decompress and then make a decision.

Q: Some of the procedures and some of the details of your Olympic participation this time around are different from four years ago. The shorter break .... Was that strictly because of the travel?

A: The travel enabled it to happen, but we decided we wouldn’t be comfortable with a break of more than 12 days and so this break is the outer parameters of what we were prepared to do.

Q: And in terms of greater access to the [Olympic] village [which NHL officials lacked in 1998 and couldn’t head off bad publicity after the trashing of a dorm room by U.S. players], and greater NHL involvement?

A: There’s a greater understanding on all sides as to what’s involved from the other side, and so I think we were able to work together and meet those needs, not the least of which, for example, was PR access....

Q: When people think of the NHL’s first involvement at Nagano, they think of the U.S. hockey players and the room damage.

A: I think that’s an unfair overgeneralization. I think when some people think of it, they may think of that, but I don’t think that’s first and foremost in everyone’s minds. Chris Chelios was quoted in the last week saying it was unfortunate, it was regrettable, they wished it didn’t happen, but it’s behind them, and I think that’s the end of the story.

Q: For a lot of people it’s not, because nobody ever took blame.

A: Well, the team as a whole took blame and made restitution [in a $3,000 check Chelios sent to Japanese Olympic officials], but I’m not going to continue an ongoing debate on this. For better or for worse, it is behind us.

Q: Traditionally, the All-Star break is a time to assess where the league stands. What are your thoughts on the league’s status competitively, financially and in terms of labor issues?

A: We have labor peace, and we will until at least [Sept. 15] 2004, so that is something that isn’t imminently on the radar screen. We have ongoing discussions with the players’ association on a whole host of issues.... The state of the league, at this point, I think we’re having a very good season in a number of respects. Competitively, night in and night out the games are close, the games are meaningful. You look at the standings, every game matters. And for a sport with a 1,230-game regular season, the fact that last season and the season before a point or two, a game, if you will, could make the difference in making the playoffs or not, the significance of our regular season has never been more apparent.

Not withstanding the recession and the overall climate, attendance is up. It’s up 1%, and that’s off of a fourth year in a row record pace.... Last weekend we had 21 games, 19 were sold out and we played to 99.9% of capacity. Our ratings on ABC are up 36% for the first two games. We’ve been very successful in renewing sponsorships over the last few months despite what many have described as a difficult economy.... And so the interest in our game is tremendous.I’ve seen a lot written about [decreased] scoring. I believe we’re down.... We’ve scored about 4,000 goals this season already. I think we’re down less than 200, which amounts to one goal maybe once every four games. On balance, would I rather see scoring up a little as opposed to down a little? The answer is yes. But I wouldn’t put this anything near the concern or crisis category. Obviously, it’s something we’ll talk about with the general managers when they meet in March, but I don’t think that’s in any respect a bellwether for the season.

Q: Going back to the 99.9% capacity you spoke about last weekend

A: I believe in this era of sports and entertainment involving fragmentation, a host of options for leisure time and leisure dollars, ticket prices, that performance over time can affect attendance. But what you look to long term is ownership, market and building, and in all three, the Mighty Ducks are more than fine. And it will come back.

Q: We’ve talked in the past about the growth of salaries vs. the growth of revenues. Where does that stand?

A: I believe when we complete the season, and obviously we’re in midstream so I can’t be definitive about this, I believe this will be a season when salaries grew faster than revenues, and I don’t view that as a positive sign. But again, when the time comes, we’ll look at what we need from an economic system going forward, and we’ll work toward making sure we have a system where all of our teams can be healthy and competitive.

Q: Herb Brooks, coach of the U.S. Olympic hockey team, suggested several months ago that for the benefit of Olympic preparation that the All-Star game should be scrapped.

A: Statements like that, and the suggestion this is a burden on the players, is really without foundation or unfair. People assume when they make that statement that if we didn’t have an All-Star game the players would have the time off. Twelve teams have four days off, I believe and 18 teams have five days and in that period, there’s an exhibition game. If we weren’t having the All-Star weekend, we’d be playing regular-season games, and everybody would be playing either two or three games.

Q: So there would have been no Olympic break for Olympic teams to get together?

A: We were taking a 12-day break for the Olympics, nothing more. We had had discussions with the players’ association about turning this into a weekend with a series of exhibition games [among Olympic teams] and Olympic prep and the players’ association told us that wasn’t anything the players were interested in.

Q: Do you see any growth in the league beyond 30 teams?

A: That is not something we’ve given any thought to in the short term, at least, and short term is a number of years. We have to make sure we have the right economic system in place so that all 30 of our clubs are healthy and competitive.