NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman speaks during the first round of the NHL hockey draft on June 28, in Las Vegas.Steve Marcus/The Associated Press
In the great org chart of sports media, Monday’s announcement of a new partnership between the NHL and Amazon should not have been a big deal.
Starting this year, Amazon will host Monday night NHL games on Amazon Prime Canada. It will also do a whip-around show for Canada on Thursdays.
It is a small part of the existing rights for a small sport in a small market. It’s a couple of press releases and an overly effusive Zoom call.
Instead, the NHL treated it like the Yalta Conference. All the generals were there, including the commander-in-chief.
Instead of going last, as would befit his rank, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman went first. He was joined on the dais by Amazon’s global sports supremo, Jay Marine. It wasn’t hard to tell who was in charge, and it was not the guy we’re used to.
Usually, Bettman plays his remarks coy. Doesn’t matter the topic – he likes to recede. He’s a good talker, but like all lawyers, he doesn’t say much. He’s about as quotable as a phone book.
This was a brand new Bettman. As Marine addressed the northern rubes in Seattle technobaffle, Bettman glowed. He was jittery with excitement.
The host asked the two men for their “meet cute.” Bettman took the assignment literally: “We went dancing together. Dating, if you will. And then we got married.” Then he laughed in a very un-Gary Bettman type way.
I guess this is the effect that proximity to a market cap of US$2-trillion has on men of a certain age.
It was remarkable enough that Bettman was hanging all over his new squeeze in public, but he was also subtly rubbishing his current partner.
Amazon Prime is “more accessible” to hockey fans than any current hockey delivery vehicle, Bettman said. “It’s a real powerhouse.”
“We’re a big deal in Canada,” Bettman said. “[Amazon is] going to make us even bigger.”
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Perhaps remembering where he was, Bettman said this was “no knock on” the NHL’s current Canadian national broadcaster, Rogers Sportsnet, who have “done a great job for us.”
EQ tip – when you say to someone that you’re not knocking them, that’s when they know for sure that you are.
You could see what Bettman likes so much about Marine. Expounding on his company’s plans for hockey, the Amazon boss switched to the international language.
“Our goal is to make it a huge national event on Monday,” Marine said. “We’re going to spend a huge amount of money to do that.”
Maybe later, Bettman and Rogers Sportsnet went out and had The Talk. ‘It’s not you, it’s Amazon and their market penetration.’
Amazon offers something no broadcaster can – the ability to turn a small-fry outfit into the next big thing.
The core offering of Amazon’s new hockey package isn’t games. It’s the docuseries, Faceoff: Inside the NHL. It’s a terrible title, unless you don’t know anything about hockey – which is the audience the NHL will be after.
The people who did Faceoff also did Drive to Survive. That show turned Formula 1 from a thriving niche business into a global behemoth by soap opera’ing the drivers.
How to get from sport, which is local, to entertainment, which is global – this is the alchemical formula every league would kill to discover.
The NHL can go on selling its broadcast rights to the ESPNs and Sportsnets of the world. It’s a decent business, but it’s not headed anywhere. Every year, the NHL will fall a little further behind football and basketball, with soccer and the WNBA coming up behind them fast. At best, it is treading water.
The other option is to be picked out of a crowd of second-tier leagues and glowed up for Europe and Asia. The look on Bettman’s face on Monday suggested he thinks that might be happening now.
The question is Amazon – how serious is it here? Is the NHL a product it intends on scaling? Or is it something it is fiddling with for the data? I’m sure even Bettman has no idea.
It’s a Canadian hockey deal, but it’s a worldwide tryout. People will watch Faceoff in Winnipeg and Halifax, but will they watch it in Paris and Tokyo?
Every sport has one of these shows now, and they’re all pretty much the same. Hockey’s done them before and they’ve made no real impact.
The hope will be that a contemporary audience is more habituated to bingeing documentaries about worlds they don’t understand. We mainlined Netflix’s recent Dallas Cowboys cheerleader doc in a couple, three days, and I hate the Dallas Cowboys on principle.
The secret to that cheerleader doc is the way in which it deglamorizes football, turning it into any high-stress, high-status, low-key-poisonous workplace. That is possible because of the charm and rawness of the women who star in it. They’ve got that charisma you can’t train into people.
Charisma is not an area of strength for the NHL, or hockey in general. Being young, rich and good at stuff is not going to win over whole continents. So while it’s not a gamble, I suspect it’s an enormous long shot.
This isn’t to suggest the NHL isn’t doing the right thing here. It has done the hard part – admitting that neither it nor its existing partners have any clue how to grow its product.
Now it has taken the obvious next step – asking smarter people to figure that out on the NHL’s behalf.
In time, Monday’s event may represent an inflection point for the NHL. It was the wedding ceremony of two companies with a singular vision for a weird Canadian pastime that changed the way the world consumes sport.
Or maybe it’ll just be the thing Canadians switch over to when the Monday Night Football game gets out of hand.