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NHL Approves Ads on Jerseys for 2022-23

It’s been a while since I last posted but such is life for a hockey blog in August.

Some news making the rounds today that should be kind of controversial as, according to Eben Novy-Williams and Scott Soshnick of Sportico.com, the NHL owners have approved ads on jerseys beginning in 2022-23.

They will become the second North American “Big Four” professional sports league to put ads on players’ jerseys, following the lead of the National Basketball Association – who began putting ads on jerseys in 2017-18. Major League Baseball has ads on umpire jerseys, but nothing more.

The ad space was approved unanimously by the NHL Board of Governors and the Sportico authors reviewed the memo sent to the NHL’s member clubs.

According to the article, the “ads must fit a rectangle 3 inches by 3.5 inches, making them slightly bigger than the patches that the NBA added to its jerseys.”

The NHL had been priming fans for the jersey ads beginning last season when teams were permitted to sell ad space on player helmets. The stickers on the helmets (Prudential in the case of the Devils) “opened new inventory for clubs to add partners {or accommodate existing ones} amid the revenue crunch of the pandemic. Commissioner Gary Bettman said teams retained more than $100 million through the program, which has since been extended.”

Teams have also been able to sell ad space on their practice jerseys in the NHL.

The authors of the article note that while jersey ads are common around the world in European hockey and international soccer, for instance, it has been slower to be adopted in the United States and Canada (although the Canadian Football League has had ads from time to time on team jerseys). The WNBA and Major League Soccer have been at the forefront of selling ads on their clubs’ uniforms.

The article on Sportico mentioned that the NBA’s jersey ad “program was estimated to boost revenues by $150 million annually. The individual team deals generally ranged from low seven figures to upwards of $20 million.”

There are inevitably going to be those who do not like this. I understand that, as I was arguing vehemently against this for many years. The thing is, there was nothing that could be done following the NBA opening Pandora’s Box and the helmet ads taking us further down the slippery slope.

Now I see it as not only inevitable, but also in a more positive light. With more money for the league and teams, the salary cap will continue to rise steadily and teams (the Devils included) will have more financial stability (and money to spend on free agents, etc.). I do not think this is going to end up as a European-style “skating billboard” situation. The owners need to balance tradition and North American sensibilities and this new-found way to make money.

In time, however, we will get used to it and it will not matter. I do not closely follow the NBA, but I wonder how many fans have just gotten acclimated to seeing the ads on their team’s jerseys?

Time will tell how this plays out, but it should not be too much of a hinderance initially.

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Binghamton Names Eklund Goaltending Coach; NHL Eyes New Season Plans

Some news to get to today and we will begin with the Devils’ American Hockey League affiliate, the Binghamton Devils, who named Brian Eklund their new goaltending coach. Tom Fitzgerald, Devils Executive Vice President and General Manager made the announcement earlier today.

Eklund previously served as goalie coach for Boston University for the last five seasons. Before coaching with the Terriers, he “was a volunteer assistant coach with Harvard University. The press release put out by the Devils notes that “in his time with the Crimson, Eklund’s goaltenders set records in wins, saves and starts, and also won the 2015 ECAC tournament.”

Eklund, a former collegiate goalie at Brown University from 1998 to 2002, played “in one regular season NHL contest (Nov. 8, 2005) over his six-year professional career.” In a neat twist, he was the third goalie for the Lightning in the 2004 Stanley Cup Playoffs and, as such, is the owner of a Stanley Cup championship ring.

He was picked 226th overall in the seventh round of the 2000 NHL Entry Draft by Tampa Bay and played three seasons in the AHL, two for the Springfield Falcons and one for the Providence Thunderbirds. He played a total of 73 games in the AHL, finishing with a 2.95 goals against average and an .874 save percentage according to the press release.

The press release notes that he spent three professional seasons in the ECHL with the Pensacola Ice Pilots and the Johnstown Chiefs. In the ECHL, he played 83 seasons and posted a 3.15 GAA and a .916 save percentage. The PR staff also said that, in the 2003-04 season, he set league records “for most minutes played in one season (3,724), saves in one season (2,194) an most saves in a playoff game (83; 2-1 2OT loss).”

The 40-year-old native of Braintree, Massachusetts also owns a goalie school in the state called Massachusetts Crease “designed to develop aspiring goalies.”

In other, more broad NHL news, Nicholas J. Cotsonika had an article on the NHL website today that outlined Commissioner Gary Bettman’s plan to get back on the ice for the 2020-21 season.

The coronavirus pandemic has altered a lot of our lives and the NHL will be no different. The league, according to remarks by Bettman on Tuesday, said that “he would never ask players to return to a bubble fort an entire season.” That is how the 2019-20 season and 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs ended up, from July 25 to September 28 in bubbles in Toronto and Edmonton.

Bettman told Cotsonika that the league would try to get teams to be able to play “in their own arenas (with or without fans depending on the local situation), in hubs or in a hybrid system.”

Cotsonika said that “any plan would be a collaborative effort between the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association, as was the 2020 Return to Play Plan. Though both sides are in constant and regular communication, there haven’t been any regular meetings.”

The plan, as it stands now would see teams, if in a bubble, “to rotate in and out.” The Commissioner “said in a virtual panel discussion during the 2020 Paley International Council Summit” he was on with Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and National Basketball Association commissioner Adam Silver: “You’ll play for 10 to 12 days. You’ll go back, go home for a week, be with your family. We’ll have our testing protocols and all the other things you need. It’s not going to be quite as effective as a bubble, but we think we can, if we go this route, minimize the risks to the extent practical and sensible. And so that’s one of the things that we’re talking about.”

Bettman also said that while the league has tried to target January 1 as a start date, “how the season starts is not necessarily how it will finish, depending on how the situation evolves.”

There is one major factor in all of this: the United States-Canada border. There is “closure to nonessential travel” between the two countries. Bettman joked that they are not “going to move all seven Canadian franchises south of the 49th Parallel, and so we have to look at alternative ways to play.” In addition, he noted that certain states have quarantining for travelers from other states within the US.

Bettman said that they need to be “flexible” and that, “as it relates to the travel issue, which is obviously the great unknown, we may have to temporarily realign to deal with geography, and that may make sense, because having some of our teams travel from Florida to California may not make sense.”

He continued by saying that “it may be that we’re better off, particularly if we’re playing a reduced schedule, which we’re contemplating, keeping it geographically centric, more divisional based, and realigning, again on a temporary basis, to deal with the travel issues.”

On the topic of fans, Cotsonika noted that, which the NHL returned in July, “it had to transform itself into a studio sport, tailoring the game presentation to a TV audience.”

Bettman, on this topic, said that “what we were doing was trying to create an energy and excitement and coverage of our game that would be compelling in the absence of fans.”

As TV ratings were down for the NHL (as, Cotsonika says, they were for all sports), Bettman made two excuses points: “One, fans in the stands give games energy that comes through on television, and some of that was missed.” (The Florida Panthers would like to have a word….)

And, “two, research showed that while avid fans would watch the NHL at any time, casual fans were less inclined to watch in the summer.” (Ahh, yes, the mythical “casual fans” who are either fans of all teams or none.)

So, the Commissioner thinks, “that’s where … a lot of the falloff came. And while we’re in the middle of working on our return to play as well, which I hope to have put to bed soon, our goal is to get back to normal schedule starting [next] fall and being done before July on a longer-term basis. That is the goal.”

Manfred applauded how the NHL in how they handled the COVID-19 pandemic. He said that MLB could learn how to handle things a little bit better and that “maybe it’s not about playing through it, maybe what you’ve really got to worry about is making sure it doesn’t spread.”

In speaking to Bettman, Manfred realized that they were going to have “shutdowns” and “accepted the fact that we were going to have to reschedule to get through.” He credited Bettman with helping him see a different approach.

Whatever they decide, and regional divisions with realignment and a reduced schedule seems to be the way they are leaning, it will just be good to get some hockey on our television screens again soon.