The Graeme Roustan Show: Bill Daly In 2025

The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 hockey business annual is available at THN.com/free, featuring the annual 100 people of power and influence list.

W. Graeme Roustan, owner and publisher of The Hockey News, sat down with special guests for peer-to-peer conversations also featured in the issue, including NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly.

Here's their full conversation in The Graeme Roustan Show:

(Don't see the video? Click here.)

Read along with an excerpt from their discussion:

W. GRAEME ROUSTAN: Every day is a gift when you’re in the hockey business.

BILL DALY: Correct. That’s the way I feel. I really do.

WGR: Yeah, so do I. There is really no other business I’d ever want to be involved in, because every day you wake up and it’s something you love, right?

BD: Yeah, I love coming to work every day. My workload is different. There’s a diversity of items you have to deal with and situations you have to manage, and it’s a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge.

WGR: I’d like to talk a little bit about international hockey because it’s in the news now. In the last year, there’s been big strides. The NHL is working with the IIHF and so forth. What’s the latest going on with the relationship there?

BD: We’re really happy with where we are internationally. That’s primarily with our partnership with the Players’ Association, which is probably stronger than it’s ever been, certainly during my tenure at the National Hockey League. We’re 50-50 partners in international hockey. We know that international best-on-best tournaments are at the top of the players’ priority lists in terms of things they want us to accomplish jointly with the Players’ Association.

We’re coming up on a tournament that we’re going to stage in February of 2025, which we’re calling the 4 Nations Face-Off. It’s going to feature exclusively NHL players, but NHL players from four top hockey countries: the United States, Canada, Finland and Sweden. It’s going to be a round-robin tournament. Four games are going to be played in Montreal, and three games in Boston. It should generate a lot of economic opportunities and activities in both of those cities. I think both cities are really excited to have it. We’re going to crown a champion on, I think, February 20th would be the date, which is a Thursday night in Boston. So, looking forward to that.

That is kind of a precursor to what we hope will become kind of a regular rotation of best on-best competition. We hope to conclude our arrangements with the IOC for NHL players to participate in the 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano, Italy. We plan to stage and execute a World Cup of Hockey tournament in 2028, followed by the Olympics, hopefully, in 2030 and the World Cup in 2032. We’ll get into a rotation of February best-on-best international tournaments that will take place every two years.

WGR: You mentioned your partner is the NHLPA. When you’re talking with them about this new kind of format, it probably wasn’t in the original CBA, because you most likely couldn’t even imagine what’s going on now. So, when you’re sitting down with them now, is there a conversation you have about how you share revenues or how it’s all divvied up?

BD: The concept is not inconsistent with the concept we have generally in our CBA, which is we’re equal partners in revenue generated, with half the revenues going to the players and half coming to the clubs and the league. There’s really no difference in international hockey. Sometimes, we handle it a little differently, as to whether we calculate that revenue as HRR or whether we take a net revenue number and split it 50-50. The effect is the same, but there are different ways to get there, and we’ve used both of those methods over time.

WGR: The players seem to be really excited about this best-on-best play, whether it’s the Olympics or World Cup. They’re really into it, aren’t they?

BD: Yeah, they have been for a long time now. We’ve come to understand that our players love representing their countries in international competition. We probably don’t get as much of an opportunity or haven’t recently had as much of an opportunity to see our best players in international competition as maybe some of the other sports have.

It’s been since 2016, when we held a World Cup of Hockey tournament exclusively in Toronto, that we’ve had international best-on-best competition. We’re really excited about this upcoming tournament because if you look at the eligible players on all four teams, it’s going to be as deep a tournament as we’ve ever seen, just talent-wise and competition-wise. It’s going to be something to really look forward to. I think it’ll be very financially successful for both parties.

"Our real financial opportunity, with the Players’ Association, is the World Cup of Hockey." - Bill Daly

WGR: On the media contracts in the U.S. and Canada, you’ve got ESPN and Disney down in the States, and they’re a part owner of TSN in Canada. But your partnership is with Rogers in Canada. How do the media rights work on one of these best-on-best tournaments?

BD: Well, it’s a good question. This one is a little unique because of its structure with only four teams and how it came about. What we’ve done with this particular property is we’ve worked with our existing national-rights holders on both sides of the border – obviously, Rogers in Canada but ESPN and Warner Brothers Discovery in the United States – on allocating the inventory to televise this event.

They’ve worked with us to enhance the opportunity for us. Obviously, we don’t participate financially in the Olympic participation. That’s a total IOC thing, and there are some expenses that are reimbursed for the parties, but that’s not a financial opportunity for us necessarily.

Our real financial opportunity, with the Players’ Association, is the World Cup of Hockey, and, typically, that’s something we work together to maximize revenues and turn it into a mini business. When we get to the World Cup of Hockey in 2028, I would imagine we’ll look at the marketplace for television rights, streaming rights or media rights. As you know, the world’s changing, and by 2028, it’ll be light-years different than it is today. But we’ll work together to maximize distribution and revenue.

"The world changes. It’s dynamic, and you have to evolve." - Bill Daly

WGR: Talking about distribution, Rogers did a deal with Amazon Prime that was approved by the NHL for Monday-night hockey and streaming, right?

BD: Yes.

WGR: And so that’s new?

BD: That is new.

WGR: Very new. And in 2026, the Canadian contract comes up. There’s no secret that Amazon Prime wants to play a bigger role in hockey. The (Mike Tyson-Jake Paul) boxing match that was on Netflix, just even a year or two years ago, you would never think that Netflix or Amazon Prime would be in the live-sports broadcasting or streaming business. Was that sort of surprising to you?

BD: I don’t think anything is really surprising to me these days, right? Because everything evolves so quickly and the world is changing. Look what’s happening to regional sports networks in the United States. Not as much in Canada, but what is happening in the United States is something that I don’t think a lot of people would have foreseen 10 years ago. The world changes. It’s dynamic, and you have to evolve. They say evolve or die. We think the streamers – the national, international and worldwide streamers – enhance the vibrancy of the competitive marketplace and will prove beneficial to people who have valuable rights to sell. Certainly, sports leagues have very valuable rights to sell. We’re excited about the future, what it holds and what our opportunities are.

WGR: It seems like every year I sit down with you and Gary, we just see what’s been going on. But it seems like this past year, there’s been a leap forward of a year or two in terms of technology gains. The dashboards, the Edge program and all the things the NHL is doing, you’ve sort of leapfrogged where you were a year ago. Has that been the strategy?

BD: It’s certainly part of the strategy. It’s an important and critical part. It’s built into our budget. These types of technology investments aren’t cheap. I give a lot of credit to our board of governors and our owners for supporting the league’s investment in new technology. We think it’s a way to, over time, maximize revenues for the benefit of everybody involved in the game. We want to stay on top of that curve and certainly don’t want to be on the bottom of that curve.

For this and more interviews with a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 issue, available at THN.com/free.