Owners Delay Decision on 2002 Olympics

NHL owners put off a decision on whether the league’s players will return to the Olympics in 2002.

“We’re on a 60- to 90-day window to either do this or not,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday at the league’s Board of Governors meetings in Phoenix.

The issue has been a thorny one since the 1998 Nagano Olympics, where NHL players were most notable for playing poorly and trashing a suite in Olympic village.

Also at the meeting, owners extended a subsidy plan for three small-market Canadian teams--Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa--despite a pending complaint before the National Labor Relations Board that the sport’s governors left the union out of the process.

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Former Czech national teammates Dominik Hasek and Jaromir Jagr are the leading vote-getters for the World team that will face the North American squad in the NHL All-Star Game on Jan. 24.

If current voting holds, Jagr and the Mighty Ducks’ Teemu Selanne would play on a line centered by Detroit’s Sergei Fedorov.

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Vancouver claimed Pittsburgh center Harry York on waivers.