NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman was a guest on “NHL Live” and talked about the possibility of the World Cup of Hockey coming back. Bettman: “If we were to announce now, ‘We're just doing a World Cup of Hockey,’ everybody would shrug and say, ‘Yeah, you've been talking about it long enough.’ If we're going to do it and make an announcement, we're going to want to have the details that everybody's going to want to know about. I'm personally excited about the possibility and I think it's something we should be doing. I hope we're in a position in the not-too-distant future to make an announcement and move forward and plan for one.” Bettman said of future NHL player participation in the Olympics, "It's a break in continuity in the season. We disappear from the 11:00pm news, all the publications for 17 days when there's nothing but basketball and us. Football's gone. There's no baseball yet. From a competitive standpoint, it impacts everybody differently. Some NHL teams will send 10 players; some will send two, which means when they come back at the end of the break, some teams are going to be more rested than others, some teams are going to be more banged up than others. There's no doubt that it has an impact on our season. Is it worth it? Clearly when you're in Vancouver or Salt Lake City you say, ‘Wow it's getting a lot of attention. A lot of coverage. The games are being played at a time where lots of people are going to watch it.’ When you're halfway around the world and games are being played in the middle of the night or 7:30 in the morning, is it worth the 17, 16 days? That's something we're going to have to focus on as to whether or not we go to PyeongChang, South Korea -- not exactly a hockey hotbed. Then was it Norway just dropped out of the '22 bidding process? So it's either Beijing -- I didn't know they had big, tall mountains there for skiing, but that's a different story -- or Kazakhstan or something like that” (“NHL Live,” NHL Network, 10/7).
