In the bowels of Rogers Place arena in Edmonton, Alberta, with Game 1 of last year’s Stanley Cup Final just hours away, Bill Daly sat quietly to the right of the NHL’s longtime commissioner, Gary Bettman, as he gamely handled a succession of questions from assembled media. Then a reporter with The Athletic asked something unexpected: Should Russian players be invited to compete in the 2026 Olympics? Bettman turned to Daly. “Why don’t you answer,” he chuckled.
For more than 20 years as deputy commissioner of one of the world’s fastest-growing organized sports, Daly has been the NHL’s man to call when a challenging issue rears its head. An antitrust lawyer by trade, Daly presided over the league’s hardline negotiations with the players’ association to establish a salary cap. What began with a prolonged player lockout in 2004 yielded a level of parity among hockey teams that today is unrivaled in professional sports—and what some say could become a model for Major League Baseball. Those conflicts seem quaint by comparison to the array of problems that have accompanied the broad expansion and global reach of modern-day pro ice hockey.
What lands on Daly’s Midtown Manhattan desk might require knowledge of public health one day and criminal law the next. He guided the league simultaneously through the Covid pandemic and the sexual assault indictments of five members of the Canadian world junior hockey team who were later acquitted. Foreign relations and international diplomacy also come into play, as when about 60 Russian-born NHL players had to navigate the U.S. Treasury sanctions and travel restrictions that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. More recently, Daly found himself fielding calls from a Canadian team asking permission to forgo playing the U.S. national anthem in its arena because crowds had grown so unruly about American tariffs. “And our answer was, ‘No, you can’t,’ ” Daly says.
What lands on Daly’s Midtown Manhattan desk might require knowledge of public health one day and criminal law the next.
One particularly vexing issue for both players and team owners: how to enable the NHL’s biggest stars to participate in the Winter Olympics, an event that has captivated generations of American hockey fans since the 1980 Lake Placid “Miracle on Ice.” Pro hockey players missed the past two cycles, and they weren’t happy about it. “We can’t stop the time,” Boston Bruins forward David Pastrnak lamented in a 2024 interview with NHL.com. At 27, Pastrnak had never been permitted to play for his native Czech Republic at the games. “You’re getting older every year. … Every Olympics you miss, it’s a long time.”
Following the success of the NBA’s Olympic “dream team” in 1992, the NHL began working on a plan to permit pro hockey players to participate. But unlike basketball, which is in its off-season during the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games arrive in the heart of the busy NHL season. “There were a bunch of logistical issues to worry about,” Daly says, though NHL players joined the Winter Olympics from 1998 to 2014.
Beyond the scheduling nightmare, he says, are questions such as player insurance. “If the player gets hurt at the Olympics and can’t play on their NHL team, the NHL team owes them a salary, so they want to be insured for that salary,” he explains. “They had nothing to do with the injury.” The challenge—much like that question about the fate of Russian players—landed in Daly’s inbox.
Sports and Legal Tangles
Bill Daly’s first brush with sports controversy came during his senior year. He had played hockey for his New Jersey high school, but Dartmouth football coach Joe Yukica recruited him to play halfback. Unfortunately, though Yukica had coached a run of decent seasons in the early 1980s, the team hit the skids during Daly’s sophomore year. After a grim 2-7-1 record in 1985, Daly’s senior season, athletic director Ted Leland asked Yukica to step aside, then removed him as coach when Yukica wouldn’t resign. But the coach took Dartmouth to court and won a preliminary injunction that halted his removal on the grounds that he still had a year remaining in his contract. Daly, a government major already interested in a legal career, took notice. “It was novel,” Daly says. “Coaches get fired all the time.” But Yukica forced the College to back down, and he coached one final, dismal season.
Intrigued by the intersection of sports and law, Daly started working at the Skadden Arps law firm as a legal assistant. After law school at NYU, he joined the firm’s antitrust team, with sports leagues as clients. Daly’s early window into the arcane negotiations between players unions, league offices, and the big money dealings of pro sports made him a natural fit for the NHL. His easygoing, down-to-earth demeanor was well suited for hardscrabble negotiations.
“He comes from the management side, but he really understands where we’re coming from, too,” says Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston and current executive director of the NHL Players’ Association. “It never gets contentious with him.”
Walsh recalls how Daly built trust with the players after NHL forward Adam Johnson had his neck sliced by an opposing player’s skate blade during a European professional game in Sheffield, England, in 2023. Johnson bled out with his teammates huddled around in front of 8,000 spectators. His death reverberated globally among pro players, and the players’ association pushed the league to do something. “Bill was front and center in making sure the players are safe, worrying about them,” Walsh says. Daly worked from inside the NHL to require neck guards, which will become mandatory for new players in the 2026-27 season.
Growing Global Reach
One evening last spring, with Garth Brooks blaring on the sound system, Daly pressed his way past pool tables, beneath antler-rack chandeliers, and through the small clutches of fans gathered at the private Sevens Club in Nashville for the broadcast of a tense NHL playoff game. Former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam warmly greeted Daly at the retreat three flights up from the racket of Nashville’s hard-drinking Broadway. A practiced politician, Haslam clasped Daly’s meaty shoulder and gestured with his other hand to marvel at the VIP crowd of sports agents, executives, and former players. “Nashville loves its hockey,” crowed Haslam, who owns the Nashville Predators, an expansion team that joined the league in 1998. Daly glanced at the hipster crowd, drinking in the remarkable progression of a gritty game born up north on rustic frozen ponds. He took a sip of whiskey.
When Daly joined the NHL counsel’s office three decades ago, the sport was still more associated with smelly arenas and blue-collar fans focused as much on the brawls as the goals. “I’ve seen it in all different phases,” he says. “For the first eight years we were trying to stay afloat, really. A lot of franchises in trouble, a lot of ownership issues, a lot of time spent saving franchises, frankly.” Last year, Daly seemed stunned when an outdoor game at the Ohio State football stadium drew 94,000 fans. “If you had asked me 15 years ago if that was possible, I would say probably not.” In 2025 the NHL reported its highest attendance numbers in the sport’s 108-year history, topping 23 million.
The future looks bright, too: Figures from USA Hockey show the numbers of youth players at an all-time high, a sign of the sport’s continuing potential. Hockey’s growth is also reflected in the sport’s firm grip on Southern cities such as Nashville, but Daly visited Music City early last year with even bigger horizons on his mind. The league had just completed the 4 Nations Face-Off, a tournament featuring players from the United States, Canada, Finland, and Sweden that Daly described as “the first stage of a plan to make our international business bigger and to make the NHL brand more prominent.”
The iconic 1980 “Miracle” game—when the United States defeated the Soviet Union and went on to win Olympic gold—demonstrated the emotional power of the Winter Games, but NHL strategists have long questioned whether the Olympics could help drive hockey’s global growth. “It’s always been a challenge to get that halo effect from the Olympics,” Daly says. “That’s what we’re trying to do with the 4 Nations.” The event was a global spectacle, with teams literally coming to blows as the puck dropped. “You don’t see that type of game in the Olympics, I’ll tell ya,” Daly says. More than 16 million fans tuned in to the tournament, 256 percent more than the audience for a similar tournament a decade earlier.
“A Delicate Balance”
Last summer, before the start of the 2025-26 season, Daly traveled to Milan, Italy. He had news to announce: The league had reached a tentative decision on the 2026 Olympics.
For the first time in more than a decade, the NHL would shut down its season for 17 days and allow its players to participate. Daly called it one of the most significant decisions the league has made in recent years. And it wasn’t easy. “We have things we want to accomplish as a league. We and the players. And that steals days from the season schedule,” he says. “It’s a delicate balance.”
“You can never really anticipate anything in this job. Things come up out of the blue and you have to be prepared to deal with it.”
Months of discussions with the International Olympic Committee and the International Ice Hockey Federation led to agreements meant to ease the logistics for star players and their pro teams. “I didn’t think there was anything that would stop us,” he says.
Whether the Olympic organizers will hold up their end remained a question even as the games approached—with Daly taking on the unenviable task of threatening to withdraw when league officials discovered the Italian-built rink had been constructed with the wrong dimensions. “Obviously if the players feel the ice is unsafe, we’re not going to play,” Daly said in December. “It’s as simple as that.” The threat had the desired effect, with Italian officials responding to Daly: “We are certain the ice will be perfect.” As for the continuing questions about involvement of Russian players, Daly left it to international organizers to answer: The country would not be invited to field an Olympic hockey team.
Waiting for the next unexpected challenge, whether on the ice or in the realm of global politics, has become one of the few certainties of Daly’s job as deputy commissioner. “You can never really anticipate anything in this job,” he says. “Things come up out of the blue, and you have to be prepared to deal with it.”
Matthew Mosk is senior investigative editorial director at CBS News, a die-hard fan of the Washington Capitals, and a frequent DAM contributor.
