NEW YORK — NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman stood between a stairway connecting two of the floors at the League’s headquarters. More than two dozen local and active members of the United States Armed Forces were mingling in a common area. There were refreshments, bubble hockey and stickhandling and accuracy shooting replicating NHL All-Star Skills.<\/p>\n
Surveying the scene, Bettman was slightly apologetic.<\/p>\n
“I don’t mean to interfere with the carnival game,” Bettman said. “We’re honored that you’re spending time with us. I guess, in at least a small way, we can thank you for your service and tell you how delighted we are having you in the NHL family, and we hope you’re having a good day and having fun.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a little different than what you normally do, but it’s a little different than what we normally do. But that’s what makes it fun.”<\/p>\n
Bettman kept smiling while getting pulled in every direction for photos, one solider leaving his image capture saying, “OMG, you made my day, my month, my year. I can’t believe I met Gary.”<\/p>\n
That alone was worth countless hours of planning from the NHL Veterans Employee Resource Group co-chaired by human resources manager Josie Russell and coordinator, player safety, Jennifer Pechello.<\/p>\n
“Anything we can do to honor our military and let them know how much we’re grateful for and respect their service is important to us as an organization,” Bettman told NHL.com. “We’ve been doing things like this, and we’ll continue to do them.”<\/p>\n
On the 14th day of May, Military Appreciation Month, a group also circled Kevin Westgarth, vice president, hockey development and strategic collaboration, SGL, to try on his Stanley Cup ring won with the 2011-12 Los Angeles Kings. Hours earlier, Bettman spotted Russell, a U.S. Army staff sergeant and medic, wearing a Veterans ERG t-shirt. The Commissioner was obliged to visit during a time when the Stanley Cup Playoffs were on the doorstep of the conference Finals, one month before he would hand the trophy to the captain of the championship-winning team and one week after a contribution to America250.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK — NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman stood between a stairway connecting two of the floors at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":722797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-722796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/722797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}