Tag: Gary Bettman

Gary Bettman on playoff format absolutely hated by NHL fans: ‘It’s working well’

Hockey fans are fed up with the NHL’s divisional playoff format.

The Stanley Cup Playoffs are the best part of a hockey season, bar none. And yet, NHL fans are wildly unsatisfied with the playoff format as it stands today.

On Wednesday, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman spoke to the media following the league’s annual GM meetings. While nothing major came out of the meetings, NHL fans did latch onto one point made by Bettman while he was discussing the upcoming playoffs.

Currently, the NHL uses a divisional format system for its playoffs, with the top three teams from each division qualifying for the postseason plus two wild cards from each conference. The format is very messy and complicated, all for the sake of getting divisional rivalries in the early rounds to increase watchability.

However, trying to force those divisional rivalries has come at the cost of losing some of the powerhouse teams way earlier than fans would like. Bettman and the NHL general managers, on the other hand, don’t believe there’s an issue with the league’s current divisional playoff format. At the GM meetings, Bettman said the NHL’s divisional playoff format is “working well” and no changes are needed to the system.

Many NHL fans — and players — would like to return to the 1-8 format, which would entirely forgo the wild card system that was created nearly a decade ago. Instead, the No. 1 and No. 8 seeds would play each other in the first round and the rest would follow suit, with reseeding after each round.

As expected, hockey fans did not take the news of the NHL sticking to its current playoff format well.

Gary Bettman doesn’t believe NHL teams tank for better lottery odds even though they absolutely do

Sure Gary…

The art of the tank is a masterful thing in the NHL. As a mostly unspoken, but definitely real, phenomenon, tanking is a tried and true method for teams who are down on their luck looking to change their fortunes by getting lucky in the draft lottery.

And yet, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman — who has held his post since 1993 — doesn’t believe tanking exists in the NHL. Bettman met with media on Tuesday in Montreal to answer some questions as part of a press tour when the subject of tanking was brought up. With generational talent Connor Bedard the consensus No. 1 draft pick come summertime, it’s no wonder we’re seeing some truly poor efforts from teams this year.

Bettman, however, was insistent that “nobody tanks” in the NHL.

Look, it’s true that players being paid to play hockey aren’t throwing games out there to aid in the tank effort. But, hockey organizations have definitely done their best to tank their seasons by gutting rosters during the offseason — hello, Chicago Blackhawks — or by making plans to sell hard at the trade deadline.

Just ask the Buffalo Sabres of 2014-15, who did everything in their power to tank for Connor McDavid but the lottery balls said otherwise. NHL fans were pretty skeptical of Bettman’s insistence that no one tanks in hockey.

The NHL’s hypocrisy on player safety has never been more apparent

The NHL has an egregious double standard when it comes to Tom Wilson.

There’s no question now that Tom Wilson should have been suspended for his antics on Monday night. After punching Pavel Buchnevich in the head while the New York Rangers forward was lying face down on the ice and ragdolling Artemi Panarin so badly his season ended on the play, Wilson came away from that debacle with just a measly $5,000 fine.

That’s quite literally pocket change for the Washington Capitals forward, who was slated to make $4.1 million in salary this year.

Meanwhile, in the fallout from Wilson’s lack of suspension, the Rangers fired the team’s general manager and president a mere 24 hours after the team posted a scathing remark decrying the decision. A convenient time to clean house for a team said to be “underachieving” this season, though conventional wisdom and the stats say otherwise.

Oh, and the Rangers were fined $250,000 for the statement the team posted on Twitter, one which NHL commissioner Gary Bettman called “unacceptable.”

Not only that, the Rangers and Capitals played a brawl-filled mess of a game on Wednesday, which saw Wilson leave after the first period due to an upper body injury and Buchnevich high-stick Anthony Mantha in the neck to the tune of… a one-game suspension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOiDff2vofk&ab_channel=SPORTSNET

At this point, you just have to laugh. Surely, the NHL’s Department of Player Safety is engaging in some sort of performance art where Wilson, the fire-starter of the blaze that has raged through the league this past week, got the lightest punishment.

And yet, here we are.

It’s more than fair to say that the NHL’s hypocrisy in regards to player safety has never had a grander stage than this. We’ve seen pushback on the league’s rulings in the past, but that was nothing compared to the cascade of dominoes that have fallen in these last few days.

Take Wilson’s $5,000 fine and compare it to the league’s latest two suspension rulings that happened immediately after. Philadelphia’s Shayne Gostisbehere was suspended two games for boarding Pittsburgh’s Mark Friedman, while Buchnevich got one for his high stick on Mantha up at the neck.

Both were undoubtedly well-deserved suspensions in their own rights, but coming immediately after Wilson’s fine — and given the pair’s lack of suspension history compared to Wilson’s laundry list — makes this ruling even more absurd.

To drive the point home even further, Wilson — the instigator here —  leaves this whole affair a mere $5,000 poorer, while Buchnevich — the retaliator — has to sit for a game and forfeit $28,017 in salary, nearly six times more than Wilson.

The most frustrating part is that this all could have been avoided had George Parros, the head of the Department of Player Safety, given Wilson even just a one-game suspension. Or had the Capitals pulled Wilson before Wednesday night’s game in preparation for the inevitable onslaught that was coming. It’s highly unlikely the Rangers would have issued their rebuke in the manner they did, or that Wednesday’s game would have had nearly that amount of carnage if Wilson was given the bare minimum punishment.

Not only that, in the fallout of this whole situation, it came to light that weeks ago, Parros did not even want to suspend Wilson after he sent Bruins’ Brandon Carlo to the hospital with a concussion in early March. Wilson only received a seven-game suspension after Bettman stepped in.

As the dust settles, this incident seemingly hasn’t changed much league-wide. The NHL isn’t making modifications to the Department of Player Safety and in fact, support for Parros and the department as a whole seems to be on the rise.

According to TSN’s Frank Seravalli, who reached out to about half of the league’s general managers, not one believed Parros was unfit for the position.

“I don’t think what Wilson did was a suspendible act,” another GM said. “I think that statement is part of the problem with society right now. Everyone wants everyone to be fired. That isn’t how it works and that’s not how you do it. George has the worst job in hockey. On every decision, one team is happy and one team is pissed.”

It’s hard to understand, from a player safety point of view, why the upper crust of the NHL — from the Department of Player Safety, to the general managers, to the Capitals themselves — won’t be harsher on Wilson while doling out correct and just punishments to others. Wilson’s suspension history — he has five going back to the 2017 preseason — wasn’t even factored into this decision, as the league first takes into account the legality of the play before even discussing a player’s past transgressions.

Given Wilson’s long and checkered history with running afoul of the NHL’s rules, the league’s current system makes no sense and is, in fact, detrimental to player safety as a whole. It’s a system designed for parity for the common NHL player, to give everyone their fair shake should they find themselves breaking one of the NHL’s rules and putting another player at risk.

However, at this point, Wilson is not your common, everyday case for the NHL anymore. Wilson crossed into Matt Cooke, Raffi Torres, John Scott, Sean Avery, and Daniel Carcillo territory some time ago, and it’s likely that his only way out is through either extensive rehabilitation to change his ways (like Cooke) or being essentially suspended out of the league (like Torres).

No meaningful lessons were learned here by Wilson. In fact, it’s likely he got some positive reinforcement out of all of this, considering how he ended up losing just $5,000 at the end of the day. He punched a defenseless player, then tossed a much smaller player around — after his helmet had fallen off — in the ensuing scrum.

If this is the precedent that the NHL and Parros are setting here, what exactly is the point of having an entire department devoted to player safety? Clearly Parros and the league have shown they’re more interested in protecting old-school, supposed “tough” players like Wilson rather than actually making difficult calls that would make the game safer.

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NHL players are finally speaking out about race, but will Gary Bettman change his stance on protests?

The NHL, like almost every other organization, has only been moved to wider support because the public is finally holding them accountable.

The Black Lives Matter and police brutality protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing have captured the attention of a usually apolitical NHL.

White hockey players, typically reticent to speak publicly about issues of race, have opened up with a sincerity and fervor that is, frankly, a little surprising. The past week or so has been something of a political awakening for some of them and as the movement towards a more equitable society grows, players have shared thoughts on white privilege, systemic racism and even marched in protests.

For its part, the NHL has rushed to embrace their newly political players when, in the past, such topics were considered anathema. What the past two weeks have thrown into sharp relief is how quickly the league’s attitudes towards open dialogue about race and political protest have shifted to align with the feelings of their white players, when, in the past, the concerns of black players were so often disregarded and pushed to the side.

About three years ago, conversations about Kaepernick’s NFL protest made their way into NHL locker rooms, and black players were asked questions about police brutality, their experiences as black men, and if they would ever take a knee during the anthem.

The player response was wide ranging, with P.K. Subban saying he’d never take a knee, to J.T. Brown and Joel Ward saying they wouldn’t rule it out.  Some white players, like Blake Wheeler, Jacob Trouba and Matt Hendricks, openly supported their black teammates, while others, like Auston Matthews and Joe Pavelski reaffirmed the misconception that taking a knee was disrespecting the troops.

Most notably, J.T. Brown, then of Tampa Bay, raised his fist during the anthem to protest racial injustice.

J.T. Brown(AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee),

There was, for a brief moment, the chance to blow open the doors on how racism has affected the league. Instead of taking the lead and pushing the conversation forward, the NHL, reading the political climate, quickly retreated to its insistence that the sport remain apolitical.

In May of 2017, Bettman said “people root for sports teams, follow sports, because it’s a communal activity. It may be one of the places where there is great unity within a community that transcends political divide.”

About visiting the White House under Trump, Bettman insisted that it is about “respecting the institution.”

“Going to the White House or not, it’s about respecting the institution. It’s not about what your politics are and who’s in the White House,” said Bettman. “Respecting the national anthem, I think it’s great for our players to be involved in political and social causes. But I also think that’s not why people come to games to see them.

Bettman’s stance has always been that players should protest on their own time.

So, I would encourage and I do encourage our players to do it on their own time. When they’re showing up for work to participate in a game that people are focused on, care about, pay a lot of money to attend, then it should be all about the game. That block of time should be apolitical…

In October of that same year, Bettman again revisited the same line. Political protests are fine he said, just do it on your own time.

With the NHL season in a hiatus at the moment, players have been spared from being asked direct questions about the nature of their political protests. Whether or not the league will support in game protests remains to be seen, but, going by the outpouring of social media support, there’s no denying that the current activism is being applauded by the league and players’ teams.

In the past few days, the NHL Twitter feed especially has been like a woke machine, retweeting players statements on Black Lives Matter, giving some of the more affecting and emotional quotes sharp graphic treatments, and, in one embarrassing incident, promoting a hype video about Tyler Seguin marching in a protest.

It’s clear that the NHL, at least on social media, is down with players using their political voices and will even raise multi-colored fist emojis in solidarity.

This is a massive difference from 2017 when the issues remained the same, but the voices talking about them were very different.

When J.T. Brown protested police injustice he got death threats and the league offered no public support. When the Capitals’ Devante Smith-Pelly gave a crushing quote about the isolation of being the only black player on his team, it was mostly ignored.

The sad truth is that the indifference black players faced when talking about these issues is precisely why white allyship is necessary to affect systemic change. The NHL, through Bettman’s comments, proved it had no interest in actively supporting a handful of black players who spoke the truth about their experiences. They were given a sympathetic and condescending pat on the back, some thin verbal encouragement and then sent back out onto the ice to block shots and dole out big hits.

The NHL, like almost every other organization, has only been moved to wider public support of these issues because the public is finally holding them accountable.  It remains to be seen if that accountability extends to players protesting during games.

In some of the better NHL player statements about George Floyd, white players acknowledged that they had buried their heads in the sand for too long and convinced themselves racism wasn’t their problem. These players candidly admitted they’d gotten in wrong in the past. It’s time for the NHL step up and do the same.

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The NHL can’t fix hockey’s toxic culture on its own and we shouldn’t expect them to

Like any other organization, the NHL needs to be held accountable and that can only come from the outside.

In his remarks to the Board of Governors on Monday evening, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman laid out a bare bones framework for dealing with the recent spate of allegations from former players about the toxic culture surrounding hockey.

“The world is changing for the better,” Bettman said. “This is an opportunity, and a moment, for positive change and this evolution should be expedited – for the benefit of everyone associated with the game we love.”

In his statement, Bettman said many of the right things about the events of the past several weeks, but the plan he presented didn’t go nearly far enough in dealing with the deep, structural issues that confront hockey and the NHL.

As for next steps, the league promised severe discipline for “inappropriate conduct engaged in by club personnel,” as well as mandatory new sensitivity training sessions for all team coaches. They have also thrown around the idea of establishing a hotline to report abuse.

And yet, of all the initiatives Bettman announced, the first thing he mentioned was the NHL’s deep aversion to being caught unaware of such incidents, a clear indication at where the league’s real priority lies.

“We don’t like surprises – the Bill Peters situation was a complete surprise,” Bettman said in his remarks. “Going forward, our clubs are on notice that if they become aware of an incident of conduct involving NHL personnel on or off the ice that is clearly inappropriate, unlawful or demonstrably abusive … there will be zero tolerance for any failure to notify us and in the event of such failure, the club and individuals involved can expect severe discipline.”

Bettman made it clear that while he objects to the use of racial slurs in the Peters incident, it was also galling the team had not informed the NHL of the possible PR disaster that awaited. There’s no doubt that one of the many frustrating things over the past few weeks for the NHL has been that players, past and present, have simply taken their stories to social media, denying the league the opportunity to get in front of allegations.

Make no mistake, the NHL is — first and foremost — a corporation whose main goal is to protect its image and preserve its profit margin. Allegations of racial and physical abuse are not only morally wrong, but also damage the bottom line.  It makes sense, from a corporate perspective, that the NHL seeks to manage the flow of information over future allegations in the hopes that the narrative can be controlled.  It’s imperative that media, fans and players don’t let them.

Dealing with the cultural shift that’s happening requires transparency and trust, and, as our own Chris Korman pointed out on Twitter, how deeply can we trust an organization to be honest about allegations that would tarnish it?  Like any other organization, the NHL needs to be held accountable and that can only truly happen from the outside.

Any significant change within hockey’s culture, all the way from the mites to the pros, isn’t going to happen with the establishment of a hotline or a mandatory training session for coaches. While discipline from the NHL is a good deterrent and motivation for teams to internally either clean house or take stock of their own history, it might actually enable cover-ups rather than accelerate real cultural change.

That said, the NHL was never going to carry the weight of fixing hockey’s toxic culture on its own. The problems are too far reaching for any one organization to put a few structural fixes in place, and the NHL has a clear conflict of interest when it comes to being candid about what happens behind closed doors. The burden then, falls on anyone who loves the sports or cares about its players–past, present and future–to do the work. That includes more oversight from media, fans taking the lead in demonstrating acceptable behavior and players being brave enough to speak up when lines are crossed.

The kind of change needed here requires a real commitment from everyone, not just the NHL.

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