The Sit-Down: Gary Bettman

You’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to do your homework. And you’ve got to make decisions for the right reasons. You have to be transparent. And if you do those things, you’re not going to bat a thousand, but at least people are going to respect the decisions, good or bad, including the ones you get wrong.

Lockouts are painful and difficult, not just personally for people at the league office or even the players but they’re painful for the thousands of people that work at the teams and the arenas and the surrounding businesses. And they’re most of all painful for the fans because in sports your fans are making an emotional investment.

We came back to record attendance and record revenues after taking a year off. And I don’t … know of any business in any industry that has closed its doors for an entire year and come back to record customers and record revenues and the game was in much better shape.

marc bryan-brown

You don’t do this job for thank-you notes. Because, as you know, even when I present the Stanley Cup, the 20,000 people in the arena generally don’t thank me.

I think the reason you haven’t seen more live sports on any of those digital platforms is because none of the big rights are up. I think there will be bidders, and so just as we morphed from three networks over the years to four, to then having cable networks such as ESPN or Turner or NBC Sports Net, I think that you’re going to see packages and the question is going to be how we all slice and dice it. How much exposure you think you need? Who wants to pay for exclusivity?

(The BAMTech deal) was an opportunity to bundle some programming, some content, to create the possibility of a year-round sports package on a digital platform. … This was just yet another opportunity to expand our reach and touch more fans than ever before.

We only went through the expansion process and granted Las Vegas an expansion team because we believed it was going to work. And why did we believe it? Well, they had an arena, [the] surrounding area’s population base of about 2 million people, and Bill Foley, terrific guy, he’s successful in his other businesses and committed to hockey.

Expanding is a major, major business decision. And you don’t do it just for notions of symmetry. We don’t have the manifest destiny of having 32 teams. Obviously if it happens, it happens. But that’ll be a function of a variety of factors, potential owner, market, building. I’m not ruling it out but we’re not obsessed with getting to 32.

In the final analysis the Olympics are terribly disruptive to our season. … The problem with the disruption to the season is twofold. One, when you stop for three weeks in February, we disappear, OK? Nobody has home games, no highlights, no coverage. We can’t feed NHL.com. … The bigger issue is so you go away in February, the most important time of our season as we get ready for the stretch drive, there’s no football, there’s no baseball. Just us and basketball. It’s a good time of year.

I think a permanent league or presence overseas is a bit of a stretch. You have the logistics of travel. Yes, the arenas, stadiums, aren’t North American standard economically. But also for us in the countries where we really matter, whether it’s Sweden or Finland or Czech or Switzerland, Germany, Russia, they have established leagues. And so we view it as a better model to work with those leagues to continue to encourage the development of world-class athletes who come play in the NHL.