Opinion: 30 Years of Gary Bettman

Adam Proteau gives his thoughts on what has made NHL commissioner Gary Bettman last 30 years in the job whether fans like him or not.

Gary Bettman has been many things over the course of his professional life: lawyer, public figure, hander-over-of-the-Stanley-Cup. But on this day – the 30th anniversary of his tenure as NHL commissioner – Bettman should be best known as the most important employee of the league’s 32 team owners. That’s what he’s been best at.

Now 70 years old, he’s become the longest-tenured commissioner of all the big-four team sports because he always knew who he was working for: the owners.

After coming over to the NHL from the NBA in 1993, Bettman has been aware of exactly who butters his bread, and he’s served his employers with a dogged determination that has endeared himself to them. Like him or not – and this writer has been plenty critical of him over the years – Bettman has undeniably understood the power dynamics of hockey’s top league.

From his earliest days as NHL commissioner, Bettman has been a keen observer of history and a fierce owner advocate. A large part of his job is to be the shield for public criticism of the owners, and he takes many opportunities to spin league issues in the favor of his bosses. The boos he receives don’t bother him. Comes with the territory.

However, one of Bettman’s most astute moves was the lesson he learned from his first labor showdown against the NHLPA in the 1994-95 league lockout: he had to protect the owners from themselves. He consolidated power in his position so that no single owner could remove him from the job. And after the NHLPA had the upper hand by the end of the ’94-95 labor showdown, Bettman was driven to never let that happen again, and he worked to build a labor war chest that vastly outmatched what the players’ union could put together.

The ensuing leverage that war chest provided was the reason Bettman was able to lock out players on multiple occasions until owners landed a team-friendly collective bargaining agreement that remains in their favor to this day. The owners couldn’t buckle under the pressures of a few marketplaces in any labor war, because Bettman created the financial wherewithal for them to always outlast players in that high-stakes game of chicken. What ultimately mattered was the financial bottom line of owners whether he was well-liked by fans and media or not.

And you can’t deny he’s made them a lot of money. Franchise values have skyrocketed under his tenure, including with league expansion. Before his implementation of the salary cap, big-moneyed teams like the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings were spending almost $80 million on player salaries. More than 15 years after the introduction of the cap, the upper ceiling limit for salaries is essentially in the same area today. That’s what you call cost control. 

Bettman has delivered cost certainty, and no team owner, small-market or large-market, begrudges him for that. There’s a reason why the league has renewed the current CBA in recent years without meaningful change to it: team owners know how good they’ve got it. That speaks to the legacy Bettman has created after his numerous run-ins with the NHLPA.

Again, it’s fair to criticize Bettman on many fronts: for instance, we still believe, and we’ll always believe that the Cup should be handed over to the captain of the Cup-winning team by a legend of that franchise. The optics of Bettman being jeered relentlessly by fans during the Cup-hand-over are off, but he appears to delight in the annual dressing down.

As recent as 2019, Bettman also denied the ongoing issue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, and its potential causality within the game. He’s increased the presence of advertisers in virtually every facet of the NHL product, from on-ice ads to rinkboard ads to ads on jerseys, and not apologized for any of it. He isn’t afraid to challenge questions, either – that’s just in the lawyer in him and his DNA.

If you’re an NHL team owner, you couldn’t have asked for a better commissioner than Gary Bettman. History will be the ultimate judge of his policies and blueprint for success, but the reason why he has thrived for three decades in his job is that the owners are more than satisfied with the job he’s done.