Begininning with the letter "C"

Today’s word of the day is “Commissioner” and can be described as: (1) an individual, group or organization who appoints an individual/organization to perform a specific task. (2) an official chosen by an athletic association to exercise broad administrative or judicial authority.

Instead of spending some more time exploring what the NHL can do with rules and when they can do it, let’s spend a minute looking at the man who’s apparently leading it. For approximately 16 years, the NHL’s has been ruled by its Commissioner, Gary Bettman. That said, he just didn’t one day decide this would be a cool job to have and just got it. There was a reason for the owners to vote in Bettman and this was mainly to expand the NHL into the US market. Right there we now know that an agenda was long in the works before Jim Balsillie and his three attempts to secure an NHL team and relocate it to Canada. Did Bettman deliver? The answer is yes. Did Bettman deliver successfully? Well that ones up for debate.

Presently there are approximately ten NHL teams that have a higher operating cost than revenue. This is not good. Along with this is the fact that these teams are based in the US and most are those expansion teams that Gary Bettman was hired to deliver to his boss’s. So you could say that he did what he was supposed to. The problem here is that both the owners and Bettman continue to drive the sport of Hockey into US markets that really don’t want it.

Bettman has become the target by many especially in this last round with Balsillie. While both could be accused of playing a bit dirty especially in the media, just remember one thing. At the end of the day, like any employee, Bettman takes his direction from those that pay him. That said, this may be an example of when “Not to shoot the Commissioner”.