from Abraham D. Madkour of SportsBusiness Journal,
During recent appearances by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly and COO John Collins, it’s obvious this is getting a great deal of their attention. Bettman summed up the appeal succinctly: “We control it. We control the media, the presentation and it’s out of season.” All of those are underlying frustrations that the league has with its participation in the Olympics.
In a recent interview in Toronto, Bettman was asked why global sponsors pay hundreds of millions of dollars to be associated with the Olympics, yet the NHL seems nonplussed by it. “They [sponsors] get to market and promote their association with the Games,” he said. “We have to fight to get access to footage of our players playing in the Olympics. At one time, we even had to fight to get access to a press availability I was having. They’ve loosened it up a little bit, but face it, if you’re a TOP sponsor, you get to market and promote your brand. We don’t.”
With that said, you can see why the league is bullish about re-creating the World Cup, which sources believe has the ability to generate more than $100 million in revenue for the league and players, and it’s revenue that sits outside of the league’s definition of Hockey Related Revenue, meaning the 50/50 joint venture would be split.
I don’t believe it’s an “either/or” on having a World Cup or whether the NHL participates in the Olympics. But there is little appeal of playing in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018 and likely either Almaty, Kazakhstan, or Beijing in 2022. Daly, asked in Toronto about the league’s pending decision to play in 2018, said, “There are some things we still need to learn, such as the mindset of the South Korean Organizing Committee and where it puts hockey in its priorities.”
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