NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman recently spoke at a City Club of Chicago event and was greeted so warmly that he said, "I'm not used to hearing all this clapping. There's generally a different sound that resonates."
Bettman certainly hears a lot of boos, especially from hockey fans. With Monday's announcement that the NHL will not send its players to the 2018 Winter Olympics, he can expect to hear even more. But make no mistake: Bettman is just the messenger for the 31 NHL owners, who have a litany of issues with sending their players to a tournament halfway around the world.
Included in owners' concerns are the fact they receive little to no financial gain from sending their assets (read: players) to the Games while also putting them at risk of injury. But the main reason owners are leery of NHL players participating in the Olympics is that the league has to shut down for three weeks in the middle of its season.
"We just disappear," Bettman said.
With that as the stumbling block, there is a solution: Move ice hockey to the Summer Games.
Now, as unappealing as that might be to some players who just grinded through an NHL season, it would solve the problem of a midseason shutdown. And it would allow some players to do what they yearn for almost as much _ if not more in some cases _ as winning a Stanley Cup: Capture a gold medal while wearing their country's uniform.
There is a precedent. Ice hockey was a sport at the 1920 Summer Games in Antwerp, Belgium (and, no, Jaromir Jagr didn't score the winning goal in that gold-medal game) before shifting to the Winter Olympics in 1924.
The NBA has no problem sending its players to the Summer Games despite a schedule very similar to the NHL's.
While it may not be the ideal situation, playing a hockey game at a venue adjacent to a sand volleyball match at the Summer Games is a solution to the NHL/Olympics conundrum.
