Professional Sports Sidelined

Gary Bettman is the commissioner of the National Hockey League (NHL), a post he has held since February 1, 1993. He was previously a senior vice president and general counsel for the National Basketball Association (NBA). Mr. Bettman is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018. 

Under Mr. Bettman, the NHL has seen rapid growth of annual league revenues, from $400 million when he was hired to nearly $5 billion in 2018-19. He has overseen the expansion of the NHL across North America, with the league’s 32nd team, the Seattle Kraken, set to begin play next season. Mr. Bettman’s vision has also enabled the NHL to be an innovative leader in sports in the area of technology and the creation of tentpole events such as the Winter Classic and Stadium Series games. In May 2014, Mr. Bettman was named “Sports Executive of the Year” by the SportsBusiness Journal and SportsBusiness Daily. In 2016, he was inducted as a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Harry C. Katz is the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining at Cornell University’s ILR School and the director of ILR’s Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Katz came to ILR in 1985. His areas of expertise include labor-management cooperation, labor relations, and contract negotiations.

Jacqueline Davidson enters her second season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as the Director of Football Research in 2021. Ms. Davidson is responsible for supporting the front office and coaching staff in roster and strategy decisions through research and development of analytical tools and methods. She also works alongside General Manager Jason Licht and Director of Football Administration Mike Greenberg on player contracts and salary cap decisions. Before joining the Buccaneers, Ms. Davidson worked in football administration with the New York Jets, spending more than eight years as the Manager of Football Administration (2007-2015) before being elevated to Director of Football Administration (2015-2018). In her role as Director of Football Administration, Ms. Davidson served as the Jets’ lead negotiator of player contracts and managed the team’s salary cap and player budgets.

JC Tretter is the president of the National Football League Players Association. In August 2022, Mr. Tretter retired from the NFL after a nine-year career. He played college football at Cornell and was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in the 2013 NFL Draft. Mr. Tretter was elected president of the NFLPA in March 2020, as the union was voting on a collective bargaining agreement with the NFL. He led the NFLPA’s negotiations with the NFL throughout the pandemic and was re-elected as president in March 2022.

Jeffrey Mishkin is the former Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of the NBA, and for the past 21 years he has been head of the sports practice at Skadden. Mr. Mishkin has long served as the NBA’s chief outside counsel and has also represented every other major sports organization in the United States, including the NHL, NFL, MLB, NCAA, PGA Tour, and USTA. He has served as counsel in some of the most significant and high-profile sports litigations over the past several decades, including 2018’s Murphy v. NCAA, in which the Supreme Court struck down the federal law that had prevented states from authorizing sports gambling, and NCAA v. Alston, now pending in the Supreme Court, which poses an antitrust challenge to the NCAA’s longstanding amateurism rules. Among many other recognitions, Mr. Mishkin was named by The Best Lawyers in America as New York Sports Lawyer of the Year in 2012, 2018, and 2020.