National Hockey league (NHL) commissioner Gary Bettman addressed the league’s potential participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Bettman, who was joined by deputy commissioner Bill Daly, also announced that the league intends to start an 82-game season for 2021-22 in mid-October. The NHL began the 2020-21 campaign on Jan. 13 as it dealt with complications surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the Olympics being scheduled from Feb. 4-20, 2022, Bettman expressed doubt about the logistics of participating in the event without a deal in place beforehand. Bettman said. “We’re already past the time that we hoped this would be resolved, we’ll deal with it, just as we’ve managed to be agile and flexible over the last 15 months. But we’re getting to be on a rather short time frame now, because this can’t go on indefinitely.”
There are things that need to be done before a team can go to the winter Olympics, one of them is that the NHL will need to shut down the regular season for two weeks should it participate in the Beijing Games. Bettman said “It seems every season, it’s a playoff ritual for me to address some aspect of officiating, let’s be clear. Our officials are not only the best hockey officials in the world, they’re the best officials in any sport. We don’t like it when it happens, in fact, we hate it, but it’s the nature of the human element in calling our game. Even with the human element, we have been and will continue to be at the forefront of adding technology to assist in their efforts.”
