A Year After COVID-19 Grounded Sports: NHL Commish Gary Bettman On The Virus, Fans Back In Arenas

March 11, 2021March 11, 2021 Alan Snel Bill Daly, Gary Bettman

By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman loves Las Vegas.

Sure, he was against legalized sports gambling at one time. But he came around and at a gambling convention in Las Vegas he told a reporter, “What, you can’t change your mind?”

Bettman listened to Golden Knights minority owners Joe and Gavin Maloof about the virtues of Las Vegas and had one-on-ones with VGK majority owner Bill Foley.

Golden Knights owner Bill Foley. Photo credit: Daniel Clark/LVSportsBiz.com

Bettman ended up clearing the way for the NHL to be the first major sports league to have a franchise in Las Vegas.

He loves having the NHL Awards Show in Las Vegas.

Bettman is a big fan of Las Vegas.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman answering reporters’ questions before a game in Las Vegas. LVSportsBiz.com photo credit: Daniel Clark.

On Thursday, he had a virtual media chat with reporters and covered several topics, including the day nearly a year ago when the NHL closed shop for a while to cope with a worldwide novel coronavirus that would claim the lives of more than a half-million Americans.

Here’s an edited version of his Q and A with the media, along with responses from Bettman’s wingman, Bill Daly.

First, Bettman’s intro.

We thought it would be appropriate as we reach the one-year mark of the pandemic and the pause that we took as a result to do a little bit of a retrospective on where we’ve been and what’s been going on, take a brief look forward, as well, and Bill and I will then be happy to answer your questions.

Obviously this year had its challenges. First and foremost, in everything we did, was a focus on health and safety, and I think we were pretty good to that commitment.

In the past year, in the face of the global pandemic, we played 521 games through Wednesday. That includes the Return To Play and the Playoffs for the ‘19-’20 season and what we played so far.

We did it for the most part, overwhelmingly the most part, without the best fans in the world. We missed that more than anything else, obviously, and you’ve heard us talk about the energy that our fans give our players in the game.

We successfully created two bubbles to finish the ‘19-’20 season under extraordinarily difficult, complex, and novel circumstances. The result there was crowning a Stanley Cup champion, and over 33,000 COVID tests without one positive.

Lightning win the Pandemic Cup. Photo: NHL Twitter

We focused on and advanced diversity and inclusion in hockey, creating councils and launching initiatives to celebrate pioneers and diversify our playing and fan bases as well as our operations, and we created a hotline.

We completed a CBA extension. We negotiated, as I think everybody knows now, a new U.S. media rights agreement. We signed 13 new corporate partners, to the league. We created new assets, the helmet decals, the virtual slot ads, division sponsors, to help our clubs retain over $100 million in revenues.

We’ve navigated through the first two months of this season under extremely challenging conditions, and we’ve been on this every day with the medical experts and enhancing our protocols, and it’s gotten us to a better place.

On February 12 we saw a high of 59 players on our COVID list. Yesterday I believe there were four. I have to pause here to acknowledge in particular Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly, who every day is on getting test results and dealing with the medical people. So in addition to all of the extraordinary things he does, this one has just been off the charts, and he has coordinated and worked very closely with Dr. Winne Meeuwisse, our chief medical officer, and Julie Grand and Jamie Hacker. This has to be among the most wearing things we’ve ever had to confront, and Bill literally has drawn the brunt of it.

ADVERTISEMENT

We also, I think successfully under the circumstances, met the challenge of playing in two countries with the border closed, and we’ve had to realign. We’ve had schedule changes, and again, we had to do this all while keeping everybody safe.

During the pause in particular and even after, there were hundreds of Zoom calls that we did with players and coaches in the early weeks of the pause. We wanted to stay connected to our fans, and I think we were able to do that. Our players took to social media with unprecedented, for them, enthusiasm, and that I think has fostered a deeper, more intense connection with our fans.

I’ll end this with where I started: Health and safety has been and remains our number one concern. It was our focus 365 days ago. It’s our number one focus and priority today.

And before I conclude, I have to thank the clubs, all the personnel, and in particular the NHL owners who have been incredibly supportive and understanding with the flexibility with which we’ve had to address daily operations.

The buy-in and the cooperation from our players and the NHL Players’ Association has been outstanding, and it’s been absolutely essential to everything that we’ve been able to do, as I’ve just described.

As we look forward, more than 10 of our clubs have fans in the building in limited numbers. We see that number continuing to increase as long as the pandemic cooperates and there’s more and more vaccinations going on. We are optimistic that as we get towards the Playoffs, the number of clubs and the number of people will continue to increase.

Golden Knights fans return to T-Mobile Arena. Photo credit: J. Tyge O’Donnell/LVSportsBiz.com

We’ll continue to adjust as necessary to complete the regular season and conduct the Playoffs, and we remain optimistic that we can be pretty darned close if not fully at normal for the start of next season.

Q. For either one of you, a question about fans in buildings. I know there are precautions being taken, masks and limited capacity. I’m curious, what is it about the buildings that you guys have as a league that makes this safe in terms of how they’re run to allow limited capacity of fans to feel safe in your buildings?

BILL DALY: So obviously we’re governed to a large extent by what the local health authorities find appropriate and not appropriate in particular markets, and that is reflective to a large extent of the conditions within each market.

On top of that, we have league-wide protocols that we’ve issued that in some cases are more stringent in local health protocols, in some cases maybe less stringent than local health protocols. I think we work with the clubs closely in essentially marrying those two sets of protocols and feel very comfortable that what is being required in terms of the distancing, the masking, in some jurisdictions the testing that’s required creates and maintains a safe environment for all the people in the building.

GARY BETTMAN: The one thing I would add. Which is really obvious, our buildings are not confined spaces. These are vast multi-hundred-thousand-square-foot facilities with roofs very, very far up over your head, with air filtration systems. Again, subject to our protocols and what local government is mandating, we think we can be safe and protected.

Q. I would like to come back to about this time last year. We were all at the General Managers meeting and we all knew what was coming but we could not know the extent of what was coming. How did you guys live like the last 24 hours before having to push the pause button?

GARY BETTMAN: Well, it’s a great question. We were very focused on trying to make sure that we had as much information as was possible, and we had been in touch with medical people, both our own and the government medical people. All the sports leagues were talking to each other, particularly at the medical officer level, and we understood that it was likely at some point we were going to have to stop operations.

I just remember getting home the night before we took the pause and being called to say, Turn on the TV, the NBA had a full building and was ready to start a game, and then they had a positive test and they couldn’t play that game, and they instantaneously were in shutdown mode.

Bill and I consulted and we had made the decision that we didn’t want to be in that situation. We didn’t want a building full of people. We wanted to be a little proactive here, and it was clear that sooner or later we were going to have a positive test, and that’s why I convened the board meeting for the next day and told the governors that it was time for us to take a pause, which is the way it played out.

Q. I just want to ask you, take you back to February 12th when you had the 59 individuals on the COVID list. How close to a worst-case scenario might that have been in your eyes, and how did you get that number down so quickly, get everybody through that process?

BILL DALY: You know, there’s no doubt that we had a very difficult couple of weeks with the number of positive cases coming back, and really it’s not necessarily one or two or a handful of positives. It’s when you’re in a situation where there’s been an outbreak on a particular team.

Certainly what has been confirmed for this process is we’re dealing with a very, very contagious virus, easily transmissible, and if people aren’t taking appropriate precautions.

We had a situation I think on February 12th where we had shut down the training facilities and the schedules for five of our clubs. We had to work through that process until enough players recovered and were able to play healthy, and at that same time we felt like we needed to assess our protocols, could we make them more effective, is there more we could be doing to reduce the transmission of the virus.

We implemented protocol revisions in early February and then again in mid-February which were designed to address some of the issues that our medical experts had indicated may be causing transmission of the virus, and it coincided with us starting to make improvements and strides.

Probably the most significant step was on February 11th when we issued protocol revision that required all team personnel, players and team personnel, to engage in a strict home/work quarantine while in the home markets.

We had protocols that we issued before the start of the season that required basically a quarantine while you’re on the road but didn’t have the same restrictions or strict restrictions with respect to activities while in the home market. This protocol revision made it very, very clear that our expectation was that the players and team personnel would basically spend all their team either in their homes or at the practice facility or game facility. They wouldn’t run errands, they wouldn’t pick up kids from school, they wouldn’t go to the drycleaners, they wouldn’t attend social interactions, et cetera, et cetera.

Obviously we relied on our ability to cut off those interactions or reduce those interactions as a way to address what we were seeing.

I give the Players’ Association and the players a lot of credit for stepping up to the plate and accepting that as necessary to make those adjustments and to change personal behaviors in such a way that has reduced the transmission of the disease. It certainly has contributed to us making the progress we’ve made over the last month.

Q. Thinking back to last year, I’ve been speaking to a lot of coaches and players that remembered thinking it was going to be a temporary pause, maybe only a matter of weeks until they got the games back and going again. Do you remember when you realized it was going to be more than a matter of weeks, and was there anything that was happening that sort of solidified that notion for you?

GARY BETTMAN: Well, we had been in touch with the medical people all along. We were following the trends. I was fortunate enough on a number of occasions to be able to consult with Dr. Fauci.

All you had to do was see the rate of positivity and the climbing death rate to understand that this was getting more and more serious.

But even today, and I assume this is true of almost everyone on this call, it’s almost hard to believe we’ve all been at this for a year and we’re still not done. Yes, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but also this isn’t a time to let our guard down or reduce our vigilance. And in some respects the year has gone in the blink of an eye because it’s hard to believe it’s been a year, and in another respects it has seemed forever.

We’ve been living this, and I indicated Bill in particular with the test results that come in every day, we have had to live this day-to-day. We’ve had to react to things on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s positive tests, whether it’s contact tracing, whether it’s postponing games and then rescheduling them, so we never really had an opportunity to say, boy, this is taking a long time.

We were dealing with the here and now. When I opened, we managed to do a lot under these circumstances, and I credit the NHL organization at the league level and all of the clubs and the players and the Players’ Association for enabling us to get as much accomplished as we have.

Our goal and our job was to power on through this as best we could, understanding that health and safety had to be the number one priority, and it always was.