NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE MEDIA CONFERENCE

April 19, 2006

Gary Bettman

Colin Campbell

Bill Daly

Stephen Weiss

COMMISSIONER GARY BETTMAN: Thank you, Frank. Good morning, everyone. First and foremost, I want to thank our fans for supporting us in record numbers as they did. Our fans stuck by us while we worked out our problems. They welcomed us back when we returned, and I know I speak for everyone connected to the league, on the ice and off it, when I offer heartfelt appreciation for such loyalty and devotion.

We just completed a really strong regular season. Overwhelmingly, people liked the rules changes that helped open up our game, and they liked the officiating standard of enforcement against the restraining tactics that had become way too prevalent. After all those years of worrying about the business of the game, it was nice to be able to focus on the fun of the game. There was more speed, more skill, more flow, more entertainment; simply, more fun. The playoff matchups weren't determined until the final moments of the season last night, and it was just a delight to watch our next generation of stars display their skill.

I could, but I'm not going to now, give you a litany of stats on every aspects of the game's improvement. We will post those stats later today for your interest and use, but two examples: For example, if you're looking at flow and pace, there were almost 13,000 fewer stoppages this season than in 2003-04 as a result of rule changes involving the "tag-up" offside, the elimination of the two-line pass and the waving off of potential icings; stick fouls were down 30 percent, the lowest level in 35 years, and I could go on and on, but this isn't the time to do that. You can see that when we post them later.

Of course, I still focus on the business of the game all of the time. Our relationship with the players and our ongoing commitment to the fans provides a different and much more stable, positive outlook. Now that we have finished a great regular season and we're heading to what I'm sure will be a terrific playoff, we can now look ahead to taking the game to a new level in seasons to come. With me on the line are deputy commissioner Bill Daly; senior executive vice president, hockey operations, Colin Campbell; and senior vice president and director of officiating, Stephen Walkom. We are all prepared to take your questions, and Colin and Stephen will continue, as will I, to guarantee that the officiating standard from the regular season will not change in the playoffs. We'll take your questions.

STEPHEN WALKOM: On the first question, I think what you're asking is, has there been any change in the way the players have played relative to the standard?

STEPHEN WALKOM: Well, I think what we are seeing is that if the players conform to the rules, there will be no penalties.

But as you know, these are great players who play right on the edge of the rules every night. We can't predict how many penalties there are going to be in the game. If they don't break any rules, there will be no penalties. But if they break the rules 20 times under the standard or the parameters of the rules that we have laid down this year, then we expect penalties to be called when the referees see them 20 times. That's the only way we can get consistency within a game, and across the league.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: Just to add to that, the officials have not been and will not be given a quota. The fact is, and I guess it's the beauty of the standards that Stephen has implemented for the officials and for the game, is that this is the standard: You call it when you see it. You call it in the first period, you call it in the last period, you call it in overtime. You see the standard being violated, you call the penalty.

If that results in more power-plays, and we probably had three more power plays on average per game through the season compared to '03-'04, but that's going to be the consequence. But that's what you have to do to get a more wide-open game. If you don't call the penalties, you'll wind up back with clutching and grabbing and nobody wants to see that.

With respect to your second question, the injury reporting during the playoffs is no different than it is during the regular season; namely, the teams need to at least generally indicate if there is an injury issue. And we are very comfortable with that standard, because this is a very physical game, and if somebody is playing with an injury, which is a testament to how great our players are and what they endure, particularly during the playoffs, we don't see any reason to increase them as targets with respect to injuries.

COLIN CAMPBELL: One of the reasons over the years it has not worked, the holding, the clutching, the grabbing, is that the very question you ask is what made this process go away time and time again. You run into a game where both teams said, 'the heck with it, we're just going to push the limit and keep hooking and holding and grabbing, and they can't keep calling it'. Or, we've had officials who were too strict and called everything, and then it would blow up; or the fans didn't have the tolerance; and the tolerance for the stoppages or the multitude of power-plays in the game, and it would go away. And we had to get over those hurdles to make this work, and those are some of the growing pains that we had to deal with to make it work. It didn't come without growing pains.

COLIN CAMPBELL: There are three hurdles, really, amongst all of the minor hurdles. The hurdles are: in November and early December when you thought it would go away. The other hurdle was after the Olympic break, and we had great races out there; you thought it would go away then. And the last big hurdle is in the playoffs; are they going to put the whistles away then.

We don't want them (the referees) to be the difference - that is what everyone used to say. The referee can't determine the outcome of the game. The players determine the outcome of the game, and your officials have to call those when they see it. And as Gary said, we're not after a quota to prove it. All we're after is to get the right call. We don't want the phantom calls, we want the right calls. If the player decides with two minutes left when an opposition players makes that break and drives to the net and it's a tie game or one-goal difference and he decides he has to hook him, hold him or commit another foul, the referee has to call it. That's the last big hurdle we're going to have to deal with, the playoffs. And there will be lots of screaming and shouting and they will accuse the officials of determining the outcome of a big game and costing some franchise millions of dollars. But to make this work, those are the things we're going to have to endure, and we'll hear lots of it during the playoffs, but that's part of the big growing pain.

STEPHEN WALKOM: We had a mini-camp right after the Olympic break, and we followed it up with lots of correspondence with the officials right up to the last game. Going into the playoffs, the series managers are coming in for a meeting tomorrow, and they will be leaving here with instructions on how to run a series and how to address the officials. We'll be following that up with a conference call with all officials on Friday, and our message to the officials with respect to the standard is identical to that of the regular season.

And our focus areas, because we know that there's going to be a lot of action in and around the nets, as there always is in the playoffs. Our guys will have to be very attentive in that area, but we just want them to go out there and call the game the way they called it in the regular season, and recognize that when they do, they will be supported.

STEPHEN WALKOM: Honestly, very little concern. I have got a lot of confidence in these guys. They understand their responsibility to the game, and if they see a foul in the game, I fully expect that they will react to it. They take their job seriously. They know that's what's expected of it them. I believe that if we have given them the proper instruction to stay the course and we know they are going to be supportive to stay the course, and we're committed to stay the course, our guys will do exactly what we want them to do.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: Actually, I'm going to add to that, because Stephen just was a little too nice on the answer. My instructions to Colie and to Stephen are: If an official puts his whistle away, they should put the official away for the rest of the playoffs. How long you work in the playoffs is discretionary, and that depends on how well you're working. And if a guy decides he's putting the whistle away, then he's done.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: Well, I think that's a concern that's a bit overstated, because OLN is available in 65 million homes and they are going to give us wall-to-wall coverage. If you look at the first rounds of the playoffs, there's going to be six hours of hockey coverage every night, most nights double-headers. They will have "On the Fly Finals" between midnight and 1:00 where you can catch up with everything that's going on.

For us, the issue has been that people have to get used to finding us in a new place. OLN's carriage is increasing in terms of the number of homes and they will continue to increase. They had very little time to get up and running, and I think that they have dramatically improved their coverage of the game in one brief season. I think it's only going to get better.

You know, it was an interesting balancing act. We were with one network partner who was a good partner for many, many years, but the shape we were in in television starting this season was a function of a decade and a half of their carriage where we were with a lot of other sports. We now get treated specially. We now have an importance. We now get an extent and level of coverage we've never had before. And if you want to judge this on one year experience, I don't think you're being fair. Over time, we think we are going to see continued improvement on the cable coverage.

And in addition, you have to look at the broadcasting package in its entirety. NBC will be offering 50 percent more NHL playoff coverage than any other previous U.S. broadcast partner. This will continue, television on a national basis, will continue to be a work-in-progress, but it is clear from the way that OLN and NBC are treating us that we are finally heading in the right direction.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: This has been a year of change for us, change in rules, lots of players changing teams under the new economic system and a change of location for our broadcast partners. It will take time for people to find us, to get into the habit, to get used to what the schedule is.

In addition to which, the most recent research we've done has said that 75 percent of our fans are saying that the games are more enjoyable to watch on TV, which is a testament to the way that OLN and NBC are covering the games, as well as TSN and CBC.

In addition, to the extent you're in a home that doesn't get OLN, call your satellite or cable provider and tell them to get it. And if you're uncertain as a fan where to find OLN where you live, both on our Web site and on the OLN TV Web site, you can put in your zip code. There's a special place to do that and it will tell you what your options are to get OLN.

OLN will continue to grow, but again, to focus on it the way we do, look at how much coverage they are giving. Six hours, wall-to-wall coverage to start the playoffs with "On the Fly Finals" at midnight. This is what we think will give our fans what they want; coupled with, we are getting more exposure than ever before on streaming games, Video on Demand, on the Internet. Games in all sports are being accessed on multiple platforms now and we are trying to service our fans through all of them.

COLIN CAMPBELL: Well, obviously with 1,230 games, I'm going to pat ourselves on the back a little bit here because having only five or six glitches this year isn't bad.

And that particular night, I think you're referring to the fact that one of the networks, a Canadian network, did not pick up the overhead feed that we have for the cameras on each net. But the other truck, the other broadcaster that night, picked up the feed, and by the time they got it, we had moved on. We actually did a footnote to that, which was when we actually got the tape in from Minnesota, from our actual video replay booth, we still could not determine that the puck was across the line from our feed because of our machines up there, could not disseminate that the speed that the TV truck could when they got the feed. So without getting too technical here, that's just the way it worked out.

We would hope that we will have both feeds. If there are two feeds from a game, we will have the feeds for both in that game, and obviously, we are going to do everything we can. I have been doing this job for seven or eight years and the most important thing, not only in the playoffs, but in any game, the most important event in a game is a goal being scored, and we have learned one thing; if it's possible to happen, it will happen. So we are going to take as much time as we need to determine if goals are scored, and also, look at pucks that are shot near the net. These things have happened over the years and we are going to be alert for that. So that's all you can do, and hopefully we got every possible feed that's in the building and we look at it in those situations.

COLIN CAMPBELL: When the broadcaster took the overhead feed, their machine was able to slow it down better than the feed we got in the booth. Our first reaction was that we were ready to fire the guy on the spot until we got the feed of what he looked at. And so we will wait long enough to make sure we get every possible feed that's out there. We've also got plans on having a communication set up with the trucks to make sure that they are giving us every possible feed.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: Actually the League doesn't have a problem with Sean Avery. I think context is important here. John Shannon, as I think all of you know, was a one-time producer of Hockey Night in Canada and is probably the most knowledgeable and passionate behind-the-scenes television operative in all of hockey, who recently joined the league office in the last few weeks.

John, in expressing his opinion in terms of what would make good television, good broadcast, I suppose because he wasn't doing it at our instructions or insistence, was questioning whether or not Sean would make for good television in the playoffs, not having much broadcast, if any, broadcast experience. In the final analysis, it was Sportsnet's decision. They were free to do or not do whatever they chose. And I think John now understands that when he works for the League, sometimes his opinions get either misconstrued or publicized. But in the final analysis it was a Sportsnet call, and John was simply expressing his broadcaster's view of whether or not this would make sense.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: No.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: No, I don't have a problem with John expressing his view. I don't know if Sean Avery would or wouldn't be any good. John is the expert in broadcasting. John, in the course of his career, including with Leafs TV, made a lot of decisions over who he thought would be good talent to have on the air and who wouldn't. And I think he was just giving them his view as an expert broadcaster as to whether or not this was something he thought would make for good television.

COLIN CAMPBELL: Well, as I said before, we had growing pains that we experienced in the past trying to introduce the kind of calls you saw this year. Any time you get more penalty calls, they are tangibly a hard thing to accept when they end up in a goal. A non-call was always easier to accept as it didn't produce an outcome or affect the outcome of the game. We had to get over that, and that was difficult. You're dealing with -- I won't call it tradition, but you're dealing with something that was ingrained in the past. There are people out there -- hockey executives, TV executives that just couldn't get over the fact that we were calling more penalties. We knew we had to get through that. We had to deal with it on a nightly basis.

And I think the one thing that we did with the time off is that we beat the heck out of this internally, with hockey people, with managers. And some of you will recall, we had a research and development camp in June of last year, with overage juniors where we tried a lot of these different things.

And you have to remember, it's two distinct parts. There are new rules that we have introduced, and there is the enforcement of the old rules; meaning the calls on penalties, and that was probably the most difficult thing to accept for the traditionalist or something that was ingrained in our system.

The two things that keep sticking out in my mind over the year and a half that we worked on this was the fact that fans needed to be entertained, and our game was not that entertaining, because coaches were good, coaches knew how to instill left wing locks, traps and combined with holding and hooking and pushing the envelope as far as you could, you could get away with the grabs. And the coaches knew what you could get away with. They have got great video systems, an avalanche of coaches with every team, and so you had to examine what was in place. So the fans were not being entertained anymore.

And the other thing that really stuck out in our mind was that Atlanta and Chicago in 2003-04, I don't think they ever blew a lead going into the third period. They had the two worst records. Now, someone might say, I don't think they had a lot of leads, but still, they never blew any leads. And the fact was, you couldn't overcome a lead going into the third period the way you could buckle things down. You could lock the hatches and there was hardly any chance of overcoming a lead.

Well you look at the one game last night, on the last night of the season, New Jersey went into the game in Montreal on the road, down 3-1, that changed everything in the East. They won 4-3. You saw the bench, saw the players hopping around. So now fans don't have to leave the game at the end of the second period saying, 'well, we know what the outcome is going to be'. It was important that you have the chance and the ability to score a goal to overcome a lead, and I think the rules that were put in place achieves that.

Now as I said, there was some tough nights, there were nights with lots of penalties; the referees had to learn as well as the players had to learn. So I think when we meet in the Finals with the General Managers and when we meet later on with the Competition Committee, I think that will be the general assessment. And how many changes have to be made, I don't think a whole lot. I think part of this is about maturing, too.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: Just to add briefly to that, this notion that we're calling, on average, three more penalties a game, that is not something that should be viewed as a problem, because that was the solution to opening up the game. If the officials are not adhering to the standards, then the game clogs up and the things that Colie just talked about, including the unpredictability of the game result, and the lead changes would not be there. As I said before, there's no quota, but you've got to call it when you see it. Otherwise the players will adjust and they will do whatever the officials will permit them to do on the ice, and that will be the neutralized skill, if given the chance.

The last point I want to make on this is in terms of the reactions, maybe there was some more penalties, but look at the results. In the most recent research we did with our fan polls, which we conducted in the last ten days, the results from the regular season has been that when you look at all of the rule changes and you look at how the game has changed, our approval ratings, when you go through the various questions: Do you like the shootout? Do you like the two-line pass being allowed? Do you like the officiating standard? Has the game improved for the better? The approval ratings from NHL fans are coming in anywhere between 85 and 90 percent, which means that even if the price we are paying is some more penalty calls, it's for a real good cause, because the result is what our fans want to see.

COMMISSIONER BETTMAN: I think what you're going to see, knowing the way our teams adjust, particularly when they are playing in a series, so they can adjust against their opponents from game-to-game, I think you're going to see more in-your-face, defensive hockey. But you can do that, and you can try and keep things close, but you're not going to be able to do it with interference and with hooking and holding and clutching and grabbing. So might we see more defensive hockey? That's okay, because teams are going to be playing within the rules.