Gary Bettman Quotes
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You don't want people rooting for anything other than the team that they love and the players that they think the world of to win. We don't want there to be another agenda.
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My message to the kids and our fans is hockey's a great game. There's a lot of hockey being played at all levels. Get involved, do it. We will be back and we will be back better than ever and hopefully as soon as possible. Don't give up on the game. It's too good.
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When you look at the team that Jimmy Rutherford has put together and the players that he has, this is just a great story of excellent in professional sports.
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The good news for us is the NHL has never been stronger, never been more popular, and that, I guess, has led to a lot of interest being expressed from a number of places, an interest in getting an expansion team, and Las Vegas happens to be one of those places.
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We went from journalism, in newspapers that gets heavily edited, to blogs, where you can express your opinions, to tweeting, where you can say anything, and it gets repeated and becomes fact when it isn't. It's something the entire world is going to have to come to grips with.
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When you're in other time zones in other places, you don't get quite as much attention; you don't get quite as much visibility for the game, and you give up a lot to do it.
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Young people, particularly in their teens and 20s, are not consuming sports the way my generation did. They are doing lots of things; they are multitasking. They are getting downloads; they are getting alerts on their computers or on their cellphones, and they are consuming sports in a more real-time but less full-time basis.
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In '94, we made the deal during collective bargaining that wasn't the right deal, just to save the season. Allowing the 'in the crease' rule, the foot-in-the-crease rule, we should have not done.
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Because of the way my words get scrutinized, I have to use a level of precision so people don't accuse me of misleading them.
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You can have the biggest markets in the world, but if the game isn't exciting, compelling, and competitive, it's not going to generate a lot of interest.
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Our franchises have never been healthier. Our league, in terms of its economic footing, has never been healthier.
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What we have tried to instill across the league through ownership and management is that we stand for inclusiveness and to judge somebody on the merits.
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We're concerned how gambling and betting affects the NHL game and changes the perception of and challenges the integrity of the NHL game.
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I don't worry about the integrity of the game. Our players are professionals.
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There's no question that the Kings have been, are, and can be great hosts for any major events.
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The relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of C.T.E. remains unknown.
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I know when you're in the business of cover sports, you look for 60-minute games and a result. It's never that simple.
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I think there needs some attention to be paid to what sport is going to represent to young people: should it be viewed in the competitive, team-oriented sense that it is now, or does it become a vehicle for betting, which may, in effect, change the atmosphere in the stadiums and the arenas?
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Our economics are not baseball's economics. Our game is not baseball's game. Our owners are not baseball's owners, with one or two exceptions. Our union is not baseball's union. What we do has to be crafted and suited to address hockey, to address the NHL, to address our 30 teams and our 700-plus players.
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I view myself as a dealmaker.
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There is less fighting in the game than we had years ago. I mean, we penalize it.
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Eliminating fighting would mean eliminating the jobs of the 'fighters,' meaning these guys would not have NHL careers.
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I would hope there would be a greater appreciation by casual sports fans of the incredible skill and passion of our players.
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Relatively, a very small percentage of betting takes place on hockey and even baseball because of the nature of the game and the scoring.