Fans appalled with Gary Bettman's salary compared to players
In a league seemingly as money-tight as the NHL, some surprising information came to light yesterday afternoon - Gary Bettman collects a yearly salary greater than the vast majority of NHL players.
As shared by the Twitter account below, Gary Bettman makes $9.3M each year, which would make him the 19th highest paid player in the NHL - just more than some of the biggest stars including Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.
In the context of being the only major sports league in North America to have a hard salary cap, Bettman taking in such an exorbitant yearly salary has soured many fans. One more prominent fan, Heatdaddy on Twitter, delivered a scathing rant about Bettman's high salary in a league where it seems all players are vastly underpaid.
Heatdaddy has a salient point: most players in the league are greatly underpaid in contrast to the supposed value of teams and their hockey related revenue, especially so to star players and depth players. Despite acting so cash-poor in limiting teams' ability to spend, and in doing so paying their players, Gary Bettman took no such action to limit the salaries of league executives, including himself.
| POLL | ||
SEPTEMBRE 5 | 239 ANSWERS Fans appalled with Gary Bettman's salary compared to players Should Gary Bettman make $9,300,000 per year? | ||
| Not a chance | 201 | 84.1 % |
| He absolutely deserves it | 18 | 7.5 % |
| Get rid of the cap and pay him whatever | 20 | 8.4 % |
| List of polls | ||