Gary Bettman flew to Helsinki for two NHL games and walked into the one subject his league has spent three years refusing to discuss.
At a press conference on Thursday, hours before Carolina played Seattle, the commissioner was pressed on Russia and on Alex Ovechkin. He did not move the NHL’s position. He went further than that, and defended the player.
“It is not the NHL’s problem”
The defense was that Ovechkin’s conduct at home is nobody’s business in North America, and that judging him from here is unfair.
“Aleksandr is a fantastic player with impressive credentials and records,” Bettman said, as reported by Svenska Yle. “Whatever he does in his home country, whether it concerns political views or other events, it is not the NHL’s problem.”
Then came the part that will travel. “I would not be too quick to judge a player whose family still lives in Russia,” he said. “None of us knows what his situation looks like. It is unfair to expect him to do or not do something in his home country.”
That is an argument, not a deflection. It is also the first time the league has offered a reason rather than silence, after the questions about Ovechkin’s September campaign advertisement for Vladimir Putin’s party produced nothing from the NHL at all. Dominik Hasek, who has spent years calling for Ovechkin to be banned from international hockey, now has a direct answer to argue with.
Club, not country
On the wider question, Bettman gave much less, and he reached for a distinction that is becoming the central argument of this whole affair.
“From the NHL’s perspective, the Russian players play for their club teams, not their country,” he said. It is precisely the line the Court of Arbitration for Sport declined to rule on, and the line Canada’s government used when it said it would stop Russians competing on Canadian soil under their national symbols. Club or country.
On the 2028 World Cup, which the NHL runs and which several nations have said they will not enter alongside Russia, he said there was time. “We do not need to make any quick decisions on this issue,” he said. “We do no business with Russians, and there is still time until the World Cup. Who knows what will happen before then?”
A reporter put it to him directly: why is the situation so complicated when Russia is still waging an invasion, and why does the NHL find it so hard to take a clear position? Bettman’s answer was that these are complicated, tragic and unfortunate times, and that “people must trust that we make the right decisions at the right time.”
The line aimed at the boycotters
The sharpest thing he said was not about Ovechkin at all.
“It is possible that some of the federations that have refused to face Russia will change their position,” Bettman said.
That is a prediction with an edge, delivered in the capital of one of the countries he was talking about. Eight federations have now ruled out playing Russia, and Latvia has gone furthest, because its own law forbids its teams from facing Russia at all. Those positions don’t look likely to soften on the commissioner’s timetable.
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