This is an interesting article about NHL Commissioner, Gary Bettman. Apparently, he's not going to apologize for the NHL's previous lockouts. Personally, I have always thought that Bettman is an unlikable figure that gets booed in almost every NHL city that he shows up in. That being said, if the owners didn't want him, he would have been gone already.
Stephen Whyno, The Canadian Press -- Gary Bettman was walking down a Toronto street recently when a fan approached him.
"Some guy walks up to me and says, 'I really don't like you,"' the NHL commissioner recalled. "And I said, 'But you don't know me.' And he says, 'Yeah but I don't like work stoppages, and I go, 'Well neither do I, so we have that in common."'
Bettman will forever take a popularity hit for three lockouts during his tenure, but he won't apologize for them. Ten years after the league ground to a halt and the 2004-05 season was cancelled, he maintains it was necessary for the health of the sport.
NHL proactive about off-ice conduct, Gary Bettman says.
Pointing to the '04 Stanley Cup final between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Calgary Flames in which the team to score the first goal won each game of the series and contrasting that with the 2013 playoffs and its unpredictability, Bettman believes the on-ice product is better than ever.
To get to this point, though, Bettman said implementing the salary cap -- which came out of the 2004-05 lockout -- was essential.
"We had teams with 80-, 90 million-dollar payrolls and we had teams with 20-million-dollar payrolls," Bettman said at a recent Canadian Club luncheon. "And I would talk to the managers and coaches of the 20-million-dollar teams and go, 'How are you doing this?' And they would say to me, to a man, 'We clutch, we grab, we hook, we hold and we do everything possible to neutralize skill for 50 minutes and then we try to steal the game.'
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