Gary Bettman’s 30 years: Don’t judge him on what he’s done, but on what could have been
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By Sean McIndoe
4h ago
Today marks the 30th anniversary of Gary Bettman becoming the NHL’s first commissioner. It’s a big milestone, one that puts Bettman ahead of legendary president Frank Calder’s 26 years and within range of Clarence Campbell’s 33.
Even that doesn’t do his term justice — given the ever-expanding size of the league and the shifting landscape of today’s pro sports world, Bettman’s reign long ago surpassed any of his predecessors in terms of complexity. He’s the most influential figure in the history of the NHL, and it’s not close.
Influential, sure. But has that influence been a positive one for the league and its fans? That’s a more complicated question.
To get to an answer, let’s begin at the beginning. On Bettman’s first official day on the job back on Feb. 1, 1993, the league was unsteadily lurching its way into a new era. Many teams were struggling financially, the games were needlessly violent and often uncompetitive, and the league had just been through a brief but jarring midseason players’ strike. In America at least, hockey was undoubtedly a niche sport that often seemed in danger of being left behind.
There are no two ways about it — Bettman inherited a mess. Compared to what the NHL was when Bettman walked through the door, the state of today’s league makes his tenure looks like an unqualified success.
But that hardly seems like the right way to judge his work. By the early ’90s, the bar for NHL leadership had been set so low that virtually any halfway competent executive could have stepped over it. If representing an upgrade on Gil Stein is good enough, then sure, hand Bettman his A-plus and be done with it. Most of us would like to aim a little higher.
So instead of comparing Bettman to what had come before, let’s take the admittedly trickier approach of measuring him against what might have been. Is the NHL that we have now the best we could do? Have hockey fans been well-served by the Bettman era?
Some seem to think so. You’ll often hear Bettman’s tenure defended with two simple words: record revenues. Today’s NHL is making far more money than ever before, the argument goes, and maybe more than they ever dreamed possible back in 1993.
That’s certainly true. But do you know what other sports have achieved record revenues over the last 30 years? Virtually all of them. Between soaring TV deals, publicly funded buildings packed with luxury boxes, an explosion in corporate sponsorship and any number of brand-new revenue streams, the last three decades have seen money pour into the world of sports at rates that border on the obscene. It’s not an exaggeration to say it would have been literally impossible for the NHL not to have achieved “record revenues” in this environment. If your goal is to defend the commissioner, just pointing at the bottom line and declaring case closed isn’t good enough.
Others might dismiss any attempt to evaluate Bettman at all, arguing that he isn’t really in charge — that he reports to 32 bosses, the NHL owners, and his job is to simply carry out their instructions. That’s nonsense, unless you want to believe the league’s notoriously penny-pinching owners are happily paying a multi-million dollar salary to a glorified stenographer. Bettman may serve many masters, and his job description certainly includes juggling their various priorities and pet peeves. But he’s the boss. The NHL is his show, for good and for bad.
And while there’s good to be found, the bad is hardly a short list. Let’s start with the obvious: Bettman’s legacy of lockouts, one that features three season-disrupting shutdowns (and counting). That’s a record no other major North American sport can match. In fact, the NHL’s total of three work stoppages that resulted in the cancellation of games during Bettman’s tenure matches those of the NFL, NBA and MLB combined. And that’s despite all three of those leagues having far more money at stake.
Bettman’s first lockout, back in 1994, was a disaster from start to finish. He thought he’d sold his owners on digging in for a long fight, but they crumbled on him as the weeks went by. He didn’t get the salary cap he wanted, and the concessions he did wrangle largely turned out to be temporary gains that faded quickly. It was his first real test as the league’s new leader, and by his own admission, he failed. Even worse, the timing was terrible; by choosing to wage his big fight in the aftermath of the Rangers’ historic Stanley Cup win, Bettman derailed the momentum of a dream season. When the lockout began, Sports Illustrated had declared “the NHL’s hot and the NBA’s not” and the New York Times was calling the league “hip” and even “sexy.” By the time the game returned after nearly four months, few south of the border even seemed to notice.
You could make a case that Bettman’s longest and most notorious lockout, the 2004-05 version that wiped out the entire season, was the easiest to defend. Yes, it made the NHL the only major North American league to ever lose an entire season to labor issues, and it was undeniably a miserable experience for the game’s fans. But at least Bettman’s vision of a salary cap league was the sort of big-picture goal he could defend as worth fighting for, a battle that he did eventually win.
But then came 2012, and yet another shutdown, this one driven by … well, nobody was quite sure. The owners wanted to get the players’ share of revenue down to something close to 50-50, and Bill Daly memorably swore that a five-year cap on contract length was the hill the league would die on before abandoning the issue. Did any of it matter enough to threaten yet another season? For the most part, the third lockout seemed to be driven more by a sense of inevitability than anything. The CBA expires, we shut down the league for a half-season or more, a new deal gets signed, everyone puts on their best solemn faces at the apology press conference and we paint a thank you message on the ice.
Even baseball, the one-time poster child for dysfunctional labor relations in pro sports, understood that wiping out its championship in 1994 was a bridge too far, and hasn’t missed a game to strike or lockout since. But not the NHL. This is just how business is done in Gary Bettman’s world. There’s a good chance it all would have happened again in 2020 if the pandemic hadn’t thrown things into chaos. We may be just three years away from the next lockout.
That’s one of the defining characteristics of Bettman’s tenure: The need to pick a fight over every issue, big and small. There was a brief window after the 2005 CBA in which the owners and players talked about being partners, and even sounded like they meant it. That feels like it was a very long time ago. These days, everything from the Olympics to the All-Star Game to scheduling is seen as an opportunity to score points at someone else’s expense. Simple interviews devolve into confrontations, valid fan concerns are sneeringly dismissed, and even the game’s greatest player found himself embroiled in a battle with the league. In Bettman’s NHL, everything has to be a fight, always. It’s exhausting.
And when fans do get a break from the league’s constant off-ice battles, they’ve spent much of the last 30 years with an on-ice product that’s difficult to watch. Bettman loves to boast that the quality of hockey has never been stronger, and in a sense, he’s absolutely right — today’s players are more skilled than ever before. Yet for most of the Bettman era, all that skill has been put to use in the service of dull, conservative hockey, with a generation of players drilled on the importance of positioning, shot-blocking, and above all else, never taking a chance or making a mistake. Bettman took over in the middle of a 1992-93 season that averaged over seven goals per game and may have been the league’s most entertaining ever; within three years, the neutral-zone trap had infected the game and scoring rates were plunging.
Some fans don’t see low-scoring games as a problem. But Bettman does, by his own admission. The league has spent over two decades constantly promising fans that a boost in offense was right around the corner, only to kick the can down the road with minor tweaks that had little or no impact. The situation has become so ingrained in the game’s identity that a small swing upward over the past few seasons — one that still leaves scoring nearly a full goal per game below what Bettman inherited — is hailed as some sort of success story.
That’s not how it works in other leagues. In 2004, the NFL got a dream matchup in its AFC championship game: Tom Brady and the Patriots vs. Peyton Manning and the Colts. But the game was a dud, thanks largely to the Patriots’ defensive backs shutting down the Colts’ high-powered passing attack, challenging their receivers with a clutch-and-grab style that bordered on mugging. It was ugly and dull, and also perfectly legal based on how the rulebook was called at the time. So the NFL changed how the rules worked. Not eventually, or after a few years of study, and not with subtle tinkering around the edges. The league overhauled the way the game was called for the following season, reversing the defensive trend and ensuring the game’s most marketable stars could shine.
The NFL recognized a problem and took immediate steps to fix it. Meanwhile, the NHL struggles just to make minor adjustments to goaltending equipment. When the NFL is running circles around you in the leadership department, something has gone terribly wrong.
Scoring is hardly the only on-ice issue to dog Bettman’s tenure. The league’s infamous skate-in-the-crease rule was conceived on his watch, and despite being widely criticized from Day 1, was allowed to linger in the rulebook until it ruined the 1999 Stanley Cup Final. The NHL appears dead set on repeating that mistake with the current mess around interference and offside reviews because proactively responding to problems is for other leagues; under Bettman’s leadership, it often seems like nothing ever really changes until it’s already too late. If then. Years from now, we may still look back at the quality of the on-ice product as Bettman’s biggest failure.
Or maybe it will be something else. There are plenty of candidates. We could go with ownership debacles involving scammers like John Spano and Boots Del Biaggio. Maybe you’d vote for the continued existence of the ridiculous loser point that artificially inflates the standings and encourages teams to play boring hockey when the games should be at their best. Or the league’s continued denial of a link between concussions and CTE, or the ongoing struggles in Arizona, or their over-the-top rush to push gambling into every corner of the fan experience, or their mixed messaging around hockey’s culture problems, or the disappearance of international best-on-best tournaments, or the near-total failure to successfully market the stars. We could point to various disappointing American television deals, including a 10-year commitment to NBC that was widely hailed as a win at the time but left the league on the sidelines just as the American sports rights bubble was filling everyone else’s pockets. The new ESPN and Turner deals are again being feted as a success; time will tell if it stays that way.
It hasn’t been all bad, and Bettman is far from the mustache-twirling villain he’s often made out to be. He deserves credit for reshaping and stabilizing the league’s financial landscape, as well as innovations like the Winter Classic. While he arrived too late to save teams like the Nordiques and Jets, he’s done an admirable job of keeping struggling teams in place over the years, weathering crises that threatened markets like Pittsburgh, Edmonton, Ottawa and Buffalo. Expansion to Las Vegas has been an unqualified success, and Seattle is headed that way. Bettman and the league deserve genuine praise for how they navigated the 2020 pandemic, finding a way to salvage two seasons under unprecedented circumstances that could have literally been an existential threat for some teams. And by all accounts, he’s a decent guy behind the scenes, one who may simply view playing the public bad guy as part of his job description.
If so, we can at least give him credit for playing the role well. Ever since Devils fans savaged him on a live broadcast during the 1995 final, booing Bettman has been a self-fulfilling rite of passage for hockey fans. Despite that, he still insists on serving as the public face of the league, even if that means getting drowned out at the entry draft or turning Stanley Cup presentations into cringe-worthy debacles. These days, the booing is almost a cliché, as much an automatic reflex as a sincere reflection of animosity.
But that’s exactly the point — we’re so used to Bettman being booed that it doesn’t even register anymore. That’s not normal. The head of a multi-billion organization isn’t supposed to be so reviled by his customers that they recoil at the mere mention of his name. That’s not cute or charming. It’s a sign that something has gone very wrong.
And so we arrive back to today and compare the NHL that Bettman inherited to the one he’s crafted in 30 years on the job. Today’s league is safer and far more competitive, but often less fun. Franchises are stable and the owners are raking in far more money than ever before, even as they continue to lose ground to the competition. Days-long player strikes were replaced by months-long owner lockouts. And in America at least, hockey remains a decidedly niche sport that seems in danger of being left behind, just like it was when Bettman arrived.
That doesn’t read like a success story to me. Maybe you view it differently. The owners certainly seem to, and maybe they’re the only vote that matters. But from a fan’s perspective, it’s hard not to look back on the last 30 years and wonder what might have been.
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