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BOCA RATON, Fla. – The NHL won’t comment on an NFL executive’s recent acknowledgement the brain disease CTE can be linked to football because it’s not “necessary or appropriate” and the two sports are different, hockey’s commissioner said Wednesday.

When asked at the annual general managers meeting to comment on the NFL’s admission, Gary Bettman stuck to his position that the league isn’t going to get into a public debate on the issue.

Hockey Widow wrote:NHL Salary Cap: Flat, unless NHLPA Escalates

Deputy commissioner Bill Daly said the salary cap will remain flat (that's $71.4 million) or will increase to $74 million if the NHLPA exercises the "escalator" clause in full. That comes from Frank Seravalli, among others.

Emails reveal Bettman, NHL execs discussed how concussions affect hockey players

“We do believe the NHL should lead on player safety and health issues. Fighting and concussions and head hits, we all know, cause cumulative and progressive cognitive harm. We want these risks and tragedies to be minimized and cared for by the NHL when and if they harm the players who made the sport great.”
The league, it turns out, wasn’t just aware of the physical impacts of head trauma, but also potential commercial impacts.

The league contracted a marketing research firm to assess the public’s view of violence in the sport.

The email files also included a 2014 chain of messages between NHL senior vice president of communications Gary Meagher and Mike Berland, CEO of market-research company Edelman Berland.

Berland’s company, according to TSN, was contracted to look into ” fan perception of violence in the NHL” compared to professional football.

“NFL is in the business of selling that they are making the game of football safer at all levels — it’s smoke and mirrors but they are masters of smoke and mirrors,” Meagher wrote to Berland in response.

Meagher said the response wasn’t “cynical” and pointed out the NHL does not spend the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” annually on public relations campaign, as the NFL does, to demonstrate the league is dealing with violence in the sport.

dbr wrote:SKYO you left out the best part by a country mile. The Globe & Mail published a search of the unsealed emails here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming ... e29425257/

Looks like a lot of email addresses follow the first initial last name format, so you can search "bburke" and have a look at all of his bellyaching to the league over the years.

They really should have tried to redact a lot of this stuff.. one of the emails has Campbell telling Burke he's going to call him in his office, with the full telephone number, which still seems to work.

The Canucks appear to be firstname.lastname so maybe you can hit up jim.benning@canucks.com about your Seth Jones plan