Worst Major League Sports Commissioner?

NHL has a work stoppage every 15 minutes and just lost half a season. League probably has more amazing young talent than at any point in history and it's being mismanaged and squandered. He's been commish for 20 years, he was at the helm when the league went from insanely exciting to a defensive shitslog that not just halted but reversed all the momentum it had been building up to for years.

Bettman is rubbish.

Stern. I don't get how Selig is even in the same conversation. The steroid shit? Dude is responsible for bringing baseball from the brink of irrelevance. He's made many positive changes for the sport.

I don't see how anyone can give an answer other than Bettman unless people are so oblivious to the NHL that they don't even recognize his name.
He's by far the worst of the bunch.

I don't know how Stern doesn't win this by a landslide. At least the other sports don't have pre-determined victories.

FYI Goodell is probably the best thing that's ever happened to a sport, ever. How many American products come to close to being as successful as the NFL product?

Coca Cola?
McDonalds?

Selig because my boy Pete is getting mistreated.

Selig by a long shot. He turned a blind eye to steroids when they were helping him win fans back after the strike debacle, then tried to convince everyone he is worried about the purity of the game.

Stern because of all of the aforementioned reasons and I'll tack on the reason allowing the game to also become a game of floppers and whiny bitches, like soccer players.

err not sure how i did that....

Azeth_sl said:

FYI Goodell is probably the best thing that's ever happened to a sport, ever. How many American products come to close to being as successful as the NFL product?

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It was already the top sport in the country for over a decade prior to him coming aboard. He's ok, I guess, but players fucking hate him and he has an enormous fucking head. He's also been pushing for expanded presence in the UK (fuck that shit, who cares?), the pussification of the sport (to "protect" players), the 18 week season (terrible idea that endangers players), and the weekly Thursday game (fucks up schedules and endangers players).

I think Selig is the only one who isn't a retard, so I'm not sure who to vote for.

Djay_sl said:

I don't see how anyone can give an answer other than Bettman unless people are so oblivious to the NHL that they don't even recognize his name.
He's by far the worst of the bunch.

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This times a million. All the people talking shit about Stern seem to discredit the fact that the NBA could easily be on scale with the NHL in terms of popularity in this country but Stern is a big reason the NBA has become as big as it is now. Is the product sketchy at best sometimes? Yes, but the league and sport is much more popular because of him.

I started looking up TV ratings, attendence, revenues, etc but there really isn't a good way to go about using these figures to portary just how fucking stupid Bettman has been. I'm not even a fan of the NHL but I hate that guy with a passion.

Written right before the lockout ended this year:
"Bettman has stubbornly refused to give up on his own bad ideas, even when serendipitously presented with viable exit strategies. In 2009, the NHL paid $140 million to buy the league?s biggest sinkhole, the Phoenix Coyotes, out of bankruptcy -- in order to prevent Research In Motion co-founder and former Chairman Jim Balsillie from acquiring the team and moving it to a legitimate hockey town in southern Ontario.
The NHL is now made up of a handful of profitable teams and a whole lot of money pits in cities that didn?t care much about hockey to begin with and are going to care even less about it when the league eventually emerges from the current lockout."
Source:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-1...al-sports.html

Bleacher report rated him the worst commissioner in North America.
"The relevance of the NHL has actually declined on Bettman?s watch. From deals with Fox to ESPN/ABC to NBC the networks playing hot potato with the pro hockey is a frightening sign of the game?s popularity in America."
Source:http://bleacherreport.com/articles/4...sports/page/14

Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird have more to do with that than Stern does.

This poll is probably more about who likes what sport/league than anything. People are going to choose whoever the commissioner is for their favorite league, because everyone always hates them. I do think that Bettman is definitely up there, despite not really giving a shit about the other leagues, if only because the NHL is the smallest and least profitable of all those leagues, has the most troubled teams and has had by far the worst record of work stoppages. I'm not so sure that a commish can have a huge impact on the quality of the on-field/ice action as a lot of that is dictated by the owners of the teams setting the rules. But the one area where the commish has near complete control is labor relations, and Bettman has proven to be an abject failure at it.

Selig I think should be a close runner up if only because MLB desperately needs a salary cap and a greater amount of parity between have and have not teams, and all the huge steroid problems it's had that the league turned a blind eye to for decades.

What about the NBA is so rigged or predetermined, by the way? And how is Stern responsible for that?

Baseball isn't even really a sport and I voted for Selig.