Hockey

The head of international ice hockey said Thursday he will work day and night to ensure NHL players participate in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, Reuters news agency reported.

But league commissioner Gary Bettman said it won't be such an easy task.

In a sometimes heated exchange at the SportAccord convention in Denver, IIHF president Rene Fasel and Bettman clashed over what will happen to the NHL's participation in the Olympics after next year in Vancouver.

For the 2014 Games in Russia and beyond, the NHL's participation in the Olympics will have to be worked into the players' collective agreement.

And the NHL commissioner said the league is seeing diminished return for its investment and chastised the IOC for not allowing the league to promote its involvement in the Olympics.

"It's not so easy to simply say 'Let's go to the Olympics,' " Bettman said. "We shut down our season for two weeks to 17 days and there is a momentum to our season that is lost...it all comes to a screeching halt and we go off to the Olympics.

"No other league stops to go do this. In fact, baseball doesn't do it and it's no longer an Olympic sport.

"This is hard, it's not always a good experience and the benefits we've sometimes seen were not always worth what we've had to sacrifice.

"I don't think we get enough credit and I don't think the IOC (International Olympic Committee) tends to recognize how difficult it is."

Fasel said bringing the major governing bodies together - the NHL, IIHF, the NHL Players Association and the International Olympic Committee - can be a challenge "or a nightmare."

"I will work day and night to have them (NHL players) in Sochi," Fasel said.

In one exchange, Fasel accosted Bettman for being more concerned with making money than growing the sport.

"You play over 4,000 games over the four years and you play 31 games at the Olympics," he said. 

The accusation prompted the NHL commissioner to retort "It has nothing to do with money."

"It has to do with the competitiveness of our season. If you have a team that has a dozen players participating in the Olympics, when we come back that team will be a little more banged up than a team that maybe sent one or two players to the Olympics."

In September, The Globe and Mail reported that any attempt by the NHL to pull out of the Games will face a fight from the NHLPA.

"NHL management does not have the right to make unilateral statements that we will not participate in the Olympics again," Paul Kelly, union executive director, told The Globe. "Players have strong views about the issue."