THE SHEER SIZE OF the recent National Hockey League broadcast rights deal with Rogers Communications — an unprecedented $5.2 billion for 12 years – is enough to bend the mind of even the most plugged-in industry watcher.
But what's equally staggering is how fast this all came together. The biggest deal in Canadian broadcast history was conceived and born in the space of about two months. “I've never seen a deal come together this quickly or this smoothly," says Rogers Media president Keith Pelley. “It's really amazing when you think about it."
Driving the need for speed was the lack of time. Deals like this are often finalized 18 to 24 months before they kick in. After CBC's exclusive negotiating window on Hockey Night In Canada closed on Aug. 31, there was barely a year left. So, this new deal germinated in September when NHL heavyweights commissioner Gary Bettman, deputy commissioner Bill Daly and COO John Collins travelled to Toronto to present Canada's broadcasters with a new concept.
Until then, the league had been looking at the traditional model – the Hockey Night In Canada package currently under contract to the CBC through the end of this hockey season and the national cable deal which expires at the same time owned by TSN (together worth a reported $140 million/season to the league). The league was armed with a new twist: A separate, new, Sunday night series. Also, the NHL opened up a new possibility: a gigantic package that could incl
ude all three.
Rogers wasn't caught completely off guard. Pelley says the company had heard rumblings about such possibilities and now those rumblings had been confirmed by the hockey execs. Sensing that possibility, Rogers dressed up one of its boardroom like a hockey rink to show the NHL how serious it was about going big.
However, they also knew that if they were going to pull off such a deal, they needed to move with the speed and tenacity of Alexander Ovechkin charging the goal. "This was something that had never been done before and you can't compare it to any other rights deals or any other property," Pelley said. Fortunately, the Rogers team included staffers from the 2010-12 Olympic Broadcast consortium who were accustomed to such multi-platform projects with spider-web-like details.
"This was something that had never been done before and you can't compare it to any other rights deals or any other property." – Keith Pelley
They came up with a proposal in almost no time.
Things came to a head on November 20 when Pelley headed a Rogers delegation to the NHL offices in New York. They got a feeling pretty quickly that their proposal was on the right track. "There was a connection early in the meeting," Pelley said. Still, nobody at Rogers was counting chickens yet.
Indeed, the fellow who did the last NHL deal for the CBC (a far more modest $500 million, five-year deal), former English Services chief Richard Stursberg, cautions as much in his book, The Tower of Babble, when dealing with the NHL commissioner: “With Gary Bettman, one is afraid to have a drink. It’s wiser to stick to water. He is always negotiating. Often when he is just speculating or gossiping or asking the weather report, he really is negotiating. It never stops.”
However, added Pelley about his negotiations, "There was a good feeling after the meeting, but there was still a lot of work to be done," he said. "You never have a deal until it's signed."
Most of that work involved ensuring CBC and TVA would be on board for Saturday night games – so negotiations started the next day and continued "feverishly" throughout the weekend, with dozens of calls bouncing back and forth among Rogers, CBC, TVA and the league.
"By Sunday we were pretty comfortable that we were going to get to a deal," Pelley said.
Then on Monday, November 25, CBC and TVA approved the deals and the biggest sports deal in Canadian history and in NHL history was in the books.
