Commissioner NHL Gary Bettman spoke about the league’s development goals, highlighting a number of countries with which cooperation will continue on the international stage.
— An intra-season tournament, like in the NBA? I’m not going to comment on the pros and cons of what another league is doing. We love our regular season. Teams already feel like they’re in the playoffs. But I think we can do something different: it’s an international competition of the best against the best type.
Ultimately we want to get to the point of competing in the Olympics, in the World Championships, because we have a great tradition of competing internationally and our players love representing their country. Small changes to the regular season should go in this direction.
If we are talking about possible international expansion of the league, depending on our schedule, it is not practical. If you play once a week, you can travel to Europe and back. But the main problem for us is that of the four major North American sports, hockey is the most international, and in Northern Europe, especially where we would be strongest, there is already a hockey infrastructure for the sport. So I’m not sure that these leagues – Swedish, Finnish – will be very happy if we come to compete with them.
We want to continue to encourage the development of world-class players in countries like Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic. So I don’t see the league expanding internationally in the near future. We want to work together to develop hockey around the world. We don’t want to compete with existing leagues that are very strong in their countries,” Bettman said, citing the ESPN studio, according to the NHL press service.
This season, for the first time, the NBA held an intraseason tournament in which game results counted toward the regular season. The winner of the contest was the Los Angeles Lakers.
Source : MatchTV
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