Gary Bettman’s Biggest Mistake During NHL Draft Revealed After Widespread Backlash

The talk should have been about how and which teams have come out as the winners after the 2025 NHL Draft Round 1. It’s not that such stories aren’t grabbing the attention, but the negative publicity that this year’s Draft has drawn will make Gary Bettman feel uneasy yet again and, more importantly, undone. Because the changes that he thought would be fun have actually left the fans wanting. And one media expert pointed it out as fact.

Drew Livingstone, the executive producer of SDPN Sports, took to Twitter on June 28 to put his points across. “The Decentralized draft wasn’t the issue, it was the way they did it”. And the tweet continued: “Just let Bettman make the picks and have the teams call players on the phone like every other league. No need for the weird zoom interviews with GMs Would have been a smooth 2 hours”.

The smooth 2 hours show that NHL fans would have loved to have followed scene by scene, turned into a long, discouraging, and failed experiment from the NHL commissioner, Bettman. Yet another step taken wrong by the NHL? The TNT and truTV viewership drop in the US has already shown how these experiments keep hurting the NHL business.

The story is developing…