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SHONNA KEOGAN: Can you tell me what it is about your training as a lawyer that’s affected your career?

GARY BETTMAN: What I learned in law school was how to figure out what you need to solve. When I went to the NHL, there was a perception, probably somewhat deserved, that hockey was lagging behind the three other majors. To back up—I was at the National Basketball Association (NBA) as it was going through the “sports metamorphosis.”

When I went to the NBA in 1981, three and a half years out of law school, I was the 25th employee, including support staff. We would negotiate national TV contracts. We’d negotiate collective bargaining agreements, and we would schedule the referees. And maybe there’d be some little licensing deals.

We weren’t the major media company that we ultimately became. The NBA was really the first league under [commissioner] David Stern to go through that metamorphosis. When I left a decade later in ’93, we were up to 700 employees, and we were doing things that hadn’t been done before.

I assume one of the reasons that the NHL hired me was that they saw what we had done at the NBA, and they said we’d like some of that.

Then I went to work, and it wasn’t on a cookie-cutter basis. I understood the things that weren’t being done conceptually, but I also understood the need—and maybe this was the legal training in terms of precedent—to adhere to the authenticity and history of what made the NHL strong and different from the other sports.

We had a history, a tradition, a team culture that was much stronger in some ways than others. But it wasn’t out there in a large way. And so what I had to do was look to what I could do to adapt what we were to what needed to be done, whether it was marketing and promotion or, subsequently, technology. To give you a timing context, when I went to the NHL, there were no league websites or team websites. Email was in its infancy.

Lawyers have to do this, particularly litigators. You have to adapt to your client. The drill was to learn everything you could learn about the client—what made us strong, what our really good assets were—and then adapt it to the things that we needed to grow and move to the next level.

”I have a bit of a mantra... I always say we have to know more about this than anybody else in that room. There can’t be a question that we can’t answer. We have to be thoroughly prepared like you’re litigating a case in court. You’ve got to know your stuff.”

Gary Bettman

BETTMAN: I speak with a lot of sports reporters and they’re always looking for the One Thing. It’s never just one thing. It’s everything. In legal training, the thinking is, “What do you see out there that affects your client?” If you’re looking to defend your client, lawyers have to figure out what all the holes are, and then how to plug them. It’s about always trying to anticipate. Law school teaches you that—to see what’s coming and how to either deflect it or use it to your advantage.

What we were going through at the NBA—and then when I went to the NHL—required so much adaptability and learning how to think on your feet. To look at the angles, make a decision as to the best path forward. That’s what my legal training taught me when doing things that had never been done before—like a salary cap or a substance abuse program or the planning around how to operate during COVID.

Another important trait is leadership: being willing to understand what you need to know, doing the homework and adapting to circumstances, and not being afraid to tell people what you expect of them and giving them the vision of where you’re going.

KEOGAN: And I guess the courage to make some unpopular calls.

BETTMAN: Well, it helps when you’re authentic. You’ve got to understand what you are and what makes you what you are before you can go to the next step, because you don’t want to burn the bridge behind it. You want to make it a stronger bridge as you go forward.

KEOGAN: Change is hard. I used to be one of those hockey purists because I listened to Islanders games on the radio when I was a kid. I thought that those expansion teams in the Southern states weren’t legit. Then I went to a Tampa Bay Lightning game, and I was horrified by how much fun I had.

BETTMAN: Part of what we are is an emotional connection. We bring people together, we give them a common experience. So you need to adapt going forward, but you need to understand what you are and where you come from.

You’re a hockey fan, and the fact that you still think aboutlistening to the Islanders games on the radio is all part of it. That’s not anything you ever want to sever. That’s what you build upon, to attract more fans.

KEOGAN: You have a reputation for deliberately soliciting criticism from your staff.

BETTMAN: That’s part of being a lawyer, too, because you want to know what the weaknesses in your case are, and you can’t be afraid to be challenged. People who live in an echo chamber can’t move on, because all they’re being told is what they want to hear.

KEOGAN: So I would imagine one of your most challenging times in terms of leadership would have been the big lockout and the lost season in 2004–05. What was that like for you to make that decision?

BETTMAN: I’m going to jump to the endpoint, and then I’ll work my way back. 

We miss an entire year, and particularly the media says we’re dead. But when we reopen the doors, we come back to record revenue, record attendance, record ratings, and the game is never better. And it’s because we had a vision as to what it is that we needed to come out with.

To make this all worthwhile is a word that I hate to use, because I don’t want anybody to think we thought a lockout was worthwhile. But we had no choice. We were paying out 74 percent of our revenues in player salaries going into that work stoppage, which was unsustainable. And I knew that we were going to be under a barrage of criticism, so I looked at the situation like a lawyer would. We had to be in a position to justify our case, so I went and got an expert witness.

I asked Arthur Levitt, the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to actually study our economics and opine on them. He said, “Well, what if I find that it’s not as bad as you’re saying?” And I told him, “Well, I’m saying what I’m being told by my clubs and my owners, and so if it’s not that bad, I’d really like to know it.”

So he does the study, and he confirms what I believed and gives a press conference saying that we are on a “treadmill to oblivion.” That was his exact quote. The Players Association negotiators went nuts. I had been telling them all along what the case was, but they just didn’t want to hear it. They felt blindsided, because now it was public that they were fighting us when maybe they shouldn’t have been.

And so I had to make sure that the clubs and the owners were on the same page, and it was up to me to give them the vision of where we were going and why we needed to do this. I had to make sure we had the resources both at the club level in terms of cash flow and at the league level. We had laid off, I think, 80 percent of our staff in anticipation. I didn’t want to be under any pressure to settle because we needed money to pay people.

I have a bit of a mantra, whether it’s me or anybody who works with me, who’s presenting something to the board: I always say we have to know more about this than anybody else in that room. There can’t be a question that we can’t answer. We have to be thoroughly prepared like you’re litigating a case in court. You’ve got to know your stuff.

I have managed to do this job for more than three decades, because the owners know what to expect from me, and I deliver the news like a judge would, no matter how bad or good it is. You hear it straight. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.