Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman believes NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has a pretty good idea of what his retirement plan is and when he will announce it.
Friedman discussed Bettman’s future with co-host Kyle Bukauskas during the latest episode of 32 Thoughts: The Podcast.
Minnesota Wild owner Craig Leipold set off alarm bells earlier this week when he appeared on The Sick Podcast – The Eye Test with Pierre McGuire and Jimmy Murphy and talked about Bettman retiring in “a couple years.” Leipold said the board of governors is “doing the planning now, and we have to make sure we get it right when he leaves.”
That was followed by a report in The Athletic, which said Bettman hadn’t made a decision when he would retire but the commissioner had brought it up with the executive committee before last month’s board of governors meeting.
Bettman has served as commissioner of the NHL since 1993 and as Friedman noted, is 72 years old — set to turn 73 in June — and closer to the end of his tenure than the beginning.
“If you listen to him over the last few months, it’s very clear he has a grand idea,” Friedman said. “Now whether it happens or not, he has something he would like to accomplish here. He came out in September and said he would love to have a CBA done by Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final. He went on CNBC and he said we’re going to open the Canadian TV negotiations. This is stuff he generally does not do, right?
“We know now that (he) and the players’ association are working on the possibility of not only a cap number for next year but a cap number for maybe three years and … I think the goal is to get it done before the deadline, we’ll see, but they’re working at it.”
The CBA is set to expire on Sept. 15, 2026, and Friedman pointed to the fact that the last time Bettman got a deal done without a lockout or COVID disruption was right before the 1998 Nagano Winter Games because the players “wanted to go to the Olympics without a problem.”
“It’s really been almost 30 years and this says to me that he wants this one done peacefully, properly, leave the sport in a good spot financially, which right now it is,” Friedman said. “So seeing all this underway, talk about the next TV deal, the next CBA, the international calendar is set for a little bit now — Olympics and the World Cup or 4 Nations, whatever they end up calling it — the fact that he went to the executive committee and said start planning for a life without me, Kyle, do you not see someone who’s thinking: I can walk away leaving this sport in a pretty good place and call it a day?”
Friedman would bet Bettman either knows when he’s going to retire or when he’ll make the announcement but wondered when will he actually step down — immediately or a year or two after the announcement — and who would take over.
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32 Thoughts: The Podcast
Hockey fans already know the name, but this is not the blog. From Sportsnet, 32 Thoughts: The Podcast with NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas is a weekly deep dive into the biggest news and interviews from the hockey world.
Top executives Steve McArdle, Keith Wachtel, Steve Mayer and Julie Grand — all of whom were promoted last year — were discussed as potential successors along with current deputy commissioner Bill Daly.
“Does (Daly) become a commissioner or does he handle the transition period where he’s the commissioner to train someone else, one of those four maybe?” Friedman said. “You and I have also talked about how there are some people in the NHL who look at Roger Goodell, who’s the NFL commissioner, who started as an intern in the NFL and eventually was groomed to lead it and the NHL may want to find one of those people and a couple people in that group qualify.
“Or — and one thing I know I have talked about with some people — I think there are some who would like to see a search, but if Bettman and the executive committee have an idea of who it should be or go right to Bill Daly, there probably won’t be a search.
“There are a lot of questions about where this could go but the thing that struck me is that Bettman clearly has a plan for when he wants to do this and what he wants to get done before he does this.”
