Off Wing Opinion: Does Gary Bettman Need Some Help?

February 24, 2005 by chuq · Comments
Filed under: Uncategorized

Off Wing Opinion: Does Gary Bettman Need Some Help?:
Here is some silliness wandering the sports bloggers:

An experienced NHL person would know something is strange about this situation. Bettman just doesn’t see it.

Does anyone see why statements like this are silly?
Bettman works for the NHL. He is, in fact, the public representative of the Board of Governors. They are, if you think about it, either the owners or GMs of the 30 NHL teams. That includes people like Bobby Clarke and Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. He is a phone call away from anyone involved in hockey, whether it’s Don Cherry or John Ferguson.
Someone please tell me: who could Gary Bettman possibly hire who could be better council and be a more knowledgeable hockey person than the people Bettman already works for, with, and around?
The logic behind this is reassuring to some, but silly: many fans don’t like how things are being done in the NHL (with good reason). Therefore, it’s gary bettman’s fault, and he’s “not a hockey guy”. So, replace him with a “hockey guy” or hire him someone who knows hockey. or something. And that’ll fix things.
Reality: Gary Bettman doesn’t run the NHL. The Board of Governers do. Those 30 owners and/or GMs. Gary doesn’t SNEEZE without their approval. Gary doesn’t need to be a hockey guy, he works for 30 of them (okay, 25 of them, plus about five useless wastes of oxygen. you guess them, I’m not saying). Gary doesn’t need to hire a hockey guy to help, there are dozens of them in the NHL offices (many of them amazingly capble and sharp people) — and frankly, if those “hockey guys” who own and run the hockey teams would have Bettman on the phone so fast and so educated his head would spin — or they’d fire his ass and replace him with someone who could follow orders.
This is the scapegoating of Gary Bettman, a sad and unfortunate attempt by some fans to avoid the basic reality: the NHL is run this way and the NHL acts this way not because Gary Bettman is an incompetent or not a “hockey guy” — but because Gary is doing exactly what his masters (the owners and GMs) want him to do. In other words, this is what the “hockey guys” want. and some fans are so unable or unwilling to accept this basic reality that they build grand conspiracies to avoid that basic reality. conspiracies like believing that Bettman can hold all 30 owners hostage to his whims and wishes, and they can’t do anything to stop him even thought they MUSt all disagree with what he’s doing. (ask Carly Fiorina about wielding that kind of absolute power….)
No, the reality is this: Gary Bettman is doing what the owners told him to do. Gary Bettman’s primary job is to be the public scapegoat so the owners don’t have to. His job is, as much as anything, to get paid a nice salary to take all of our abuse.
If you don’t like how the game’s being run, don’t blame Bettman. He’s not the master. The owners are, and he doesn’t dictate to them, he implements FOR them. Swapping out Bettman won’t fix things — although if the owners think it’ll settle down the fans, they’ll give him a package and publicly boot his butt in a nanosecond (and privately thank him for taking it with a smile) — and the scary thing is, a lot of fans will buy into it.
Now, dn’t mistake me for a FAN of Bettman, although I’m a lot less negative about him than many. A lot of what he’s blamed for is from his predecessors, and in many cases, he minimized what could be much worse damage. Some of the things, he probably had no chance of succeeding (the TV ratings problem). The NHL under his watch isn’t great, but the NHL he inherited was already a disaster, and people conveniently forget that.
And if you don’t like “Gary Bettman’s” NHL, you have a REAL problem, because that NHL is the NHL the owners and GM’s told him to build. So hiring “hockey guys” or replacing bettman won’t solve that. it’s the hockey guys who did it.