Gary Bettman wants better timeslot for Olympic hockey gold medal game

Gary Bettman got exactly what he wanted from Sunday’s gold medal game — well, almost everything.

The United States-Canada final pulled in 18.6 million viewers on NBC, spiking to 26 million when Jack Hughes scored in overtime to deliver America’s first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since 1980. By any reasonable standard, those are excellent numbers. It was NBC’s second-best Olympic hockey rating ever and proved the NHL made the right call by sending players back to the Games after sitting out 2018 and 2022. But Bettman thinks the league left viewers on the table because of the 8:10 a.m. ET start time, and he said as much Tuesday at the Sports Business Journal’s National Sports Forum in St. Louis.

The problem is that the early morning kickoff wasn’t NBC’s choice. Olympic organizers scheduled the Closing Ceremony for Sunday evening in Verona, about two hours by car from Milan’s hockey arena. A 2:10 p.m. local start gave both teams just enough time to shower, celebrate, and make the drive to the ancient Roman amphitheater before the ceremony began. The IOC wasn’t moving one of the Olympics’ marquee events to make American television executives happier.

“While we did a terrific rating, I’ve been told by reliable sources in the broadcasting business that the rating could’ve been twice as high,” Bettman said, suggesting the awkward timeslot cost the game millions of potential viewers.

He’s not wrong. The 2010 gold medal game in Vancouver — the last Olympics with NHL players before this year — drew 27.6 million viewers with a 3:15 p.m. ET start. That put the game on during the afternoon across the East Coast and around lunchtime out West, hitting when people were actually awake and near a TV. Sunday’s game saw the puck drop at 8:10 a.m., which meant Americans had to wake up early or avoid their phones until they could watch a replay in primetime.

The 2030 Winter Olympics are headed to the French Alps, and Bettman’s already working on solutions even though France shares Italy’s time zone. He mentioned having good conversations with the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, about making adjustments.

The timeslot isn’t his only complaint. Bettman’s also annoyed that the IOC won’t let the NHL use Olympic footage for marketing. The league spent months negotiating to send players to Italy, but couldn’t turn Hughes’ overtime winner into promotional material without Olympic permission. That’s an odd restriction considering the whole reason for NHL participation was supposed to be growing hockey’s profile, at least in North America.

Salt Lake City in 2034 would completely fix the time zone problem. A gold medal game in Utah would air in primetime across the entire continent, without any scheduling acrobatics. But eight years is a long time to wait, and Bettman doesn’t seem interested in being patient.

Whether the IOC will actually accommodate the NHL remains to be seen. Bettman sounds encouraged by his conversations with Coventry, but the Olympics have been making concessions to broadcasters and corporate sponsors for decades. That doesn’t mean they’re inclined to reshuffle their entire event around the preferences of one professional league.