Campbell’s devotion to NHL leads to Hockey Hall of Fame induction

The 2024 Hockey Hall of Fame induction is Monday. This class includes Pavel Datsyuk, Shea Weber, Jeremy Roenick, Natalie Darwitz, Krissy Wendell-Pohl, Colin Campbell and David Poile. Here, NHL.com senior writer Dan Rosen profiles Campbell:

TORONTO -- When it's cold enough, like so many bodies of water across the country, Lake Lisgar in Tillsonburg, Ontario freezes deep and hard enough to become a skating rink. Years ago, like so many young Canadian boys and girls, Colin Campbell would walk the 100 yards from his house with his skates and gear so he could go play some hockey.

He wasn't thinking about rules and innovations at the time, although when Campbell was 10, he was given a junior referee certificate. Nevertheless, it was on that frozen slice of Canada that Campbell's hockey mind started to develop, where his thoughts of how the game should be played started to form.

"I remember if you hooked a guy he would turn around and go, 'What are you doing, you idiot? You don't hook me playing pond hockey,'" Campbell said. "If you slashed a hand, I mean, don't do that. That's the way hockey should be -- pure."

Years later, Campbell's quest for purity at the game's highest level has led him into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Builder category, where the NHL's 71-year-old senior executive vice president of hockey operations will be inducted Monday, along with fellow Builder David Poile, and players Natalie Darwitz, Jeremy Roenick, Shea Weber, Pavel Datsyuk and Krissy Wendell-Pohl.

Campbell has been a driving force and leading voice in every decision and innovation the NHL has made since he became a League executive in 1998 following an 11-year playing career as an undersized defenseman (5-foot-9) and 13-year NHL coaching career, including three-plus seasons as New York Rangers coach (1994-98).

It is in part because of Campbell's hockey mind and his ability to be a guide, sounding board, occasional punching bag, ultimate ruler of the NHL’s general managers, and to run a hockey operations department that is at the forefront of everything that happens on the ice that has paved the way for the skill to dazzle and entertain us every night the way it does now.

His ideas are evident in how the game is played, officiated, reviewed, replayed and even televised for more than a quarter century.

"You think about 2005, when we come out of the work stoppage and the game needed a reset with a bunch of rule changes; he was very influential in that," said Ken Holland, the former Detroit Red Wings and Edmonton Oilers general manager who was inducted into the Hall of Fame's Builder category in 2020. "He has led the general managers over two decades, almost three, and the game is in a great place. He's a massive part of it. He's given his life to the game."

Campbell saw one NHL game in person as a child, the Chicago Blackhawks at the Detroit Red Wings at the old Detroit Olympia. He didn't play at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto until he was playing at the junior level with the Peterborough Petes in the early 1970s against the Toronto Marlies.

"I never could come to Toronto," Campbell said.

He did once as a baseball player in the summer. That's when he first saw the Hockey Hall of Fame at Exhibition Place, its home before moving into its current building at the corner of Yonge and Front Streets.

"Over there on the water was the first Hall of Fame," Campbell said, pointing out the window of his office at the NHL's Toronto headquarters on Bay Street next to Scotiabank Arena. "I remember going in there when I was at a baseball tournament in August. It was the CNE Exhibition. It was a big fair and they had a small building, and it was the Hall of Fame. I remember going in there and seeing it. My dream was to get in as a player."

Campbell's playing career wouldn't allow that. He scored 25 goals in 636 NHL games with the Pittsburgh Penguins, Colorado Rockies, Edmonton Oilers, Vancouver Canucks and Red Wings from 1974-85.

His coaching career, while it did lead to winning the Stanley Cup in 1994 as an assistant with the Rangers, also wasn't strong enough on its own merits to get him into the Hall of Fame.

But Campbell was hired by the NHL on July 20, 1998 after he was fired by the Rangers during the 1998 Olympic break, 57 games into the 1997-98 season. He replaced Brian Burke, who left to become the Canucks' GM. He found his life's work at a time when he thought he was just making a pitstop to the next coaching job.

"I had no idea," Campbell said. "I figured I would do this job for a couple years and it would be a good experience. I checked with all the head coaches of the Rangers that I could and most of the other guys there got head coaching jobs after the Rangers. You got exposure there and I had a pretty good record there, so I'm thinking I'll get another job someplace else.

"Then they forgot I was a coach because I was in this job, and I was making more management decisions. I then had three for sure opportunities in management and one I got to the city, Philadelphia. I got there and then I had second thoughts."

Instead of leaving, Campbell dug in to make the game better and more visible.

The Situation Room in Toronto, the NHL's central video hub, where every second of every game played is watched and charted, where all video replay goes through, was Campbell's creation.

He said he had a vision for it when he used to play in Detroit, and he had a friend whose family owned an appliance store with an area in the back that had a closed room with all the new televisions.

"We'd go in there and watch the games," Campbell said. "My buddy had one of those big satellite dishes so we could get a couple more games on the down feeds as well as the games you could get on regular TV."

Not every game was available in 1998 because not every game was televised when Campbell got to the League. There was nobody assigned to record or monitor the games.

"We would need to have the games sent to us from NHL productions up in Tappan, New York, or we would get video tapes sent to us from the teams if they wanted us to review something," said Damian Echevarrieta, the NHL's senior vice president of player safety and hockey operations who Campbell brought to the NHL shortly after he was hired. "That's why you sometimes still hear older hockey people say things like, 'They are going to send the tape into the League.'"

Campbell, Echevarrieta and Claude Loiselle set up the first video room in the NHL's former New York City office on Sixth Avenue, a stone’s throw from Radio City Music Hall.

To call it makeshift would be an understatement.

"It was made up of many different sized monitors and mismatched VCRs all recording the games that we were bringing into the building through the use of a small satellite dish that was pointing out of the window in one of the conference rooms," Echevarrieta said. "Well, one night I was monitoring and recording seven or eight games when they all went black. I had no idea what happened. As it turned out, the late-night cleaning crew accidentally let the window blinds down, blocking the satellite dish and basically shutting the League office down temporarily."

Campbell’s duties at the time included being the League's disciplinarian. If there was any play in question, he had to see it.

Well, he would occasionally return home to Ontario on weekends to visit his family. Cell phones and email were just coming into existence, but you couldn't send videos. So, on the rare times when Echevarrieta had a clip that Campbell had to see and he wasn't in New York, they would improvise a way to get it to him.

Echevarrieta would bring a video cassette recording of the play to LaGuardia Airport. He would locate the gate for the next Air Canada flight to Toronto, give the video cassette to the attendant, and tell him or her that there would be a man by the name of Colin Campbell waiting at the gate in Toronto and to give it to him.

Campbell would have to go home, pop the cassette in the VCR and watch it before making any determination. What now takes seconds took hours and required clearing a few unknown hurdles.

"If you see the Player Safety video room here in the New York office or the new Hockey Ops video room in Toronto with the absolute latest in technology and fully staffed, you will realize how far we have come under Colin's leadership," Echevarrieta said.

Watch the game and you see it too.

Campbell was at the forefront of the rule changes that came out of the 2004-05 work stoppage that reduced the amount of obstruction that was happening, opening the game and allowing for more skill and offense, and for smaller players to have the ability to make a bigger impact.

He led the meetings during that work stoppage that featured general managers Don Waddell, Poile, Bob Gainey and Kevin Lowe, the late Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider, and players Trevor Linden, Martin Brodeur, Brendan Shanahan, Rob Blake and Mike Gartner, along with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.

"We were going through some major discussions about rule changes," Waddell said. "We had unfortunately a lot of time to talk about it because we weren't playing hockey, but I would say coming out of what we call the old school, he was very open minded about looking at new ways to make the game better and faster."

Campbell recalled one specific conversation he had with Holland.

"I remember saying to Kenny, 'What's a hooking penalty? Is it two times that you hook or three before you call the penalty?'" Campbell said. "He says, 'Well, two if the guy goes down, three if he doesn't.' It's crazy what we allowed at the time, what we expected to be called and what we allowed to not be called. And what scared me most in '04-05 is when I heard players say they're not having fun playing the game the way it was being played on my watch. We had to find a way to entertain."

The League is now at a point where goal-scoring is up more than a goal per game from 2003-04, the last season played before the rule changes. Speed is emphasized. Slashes and hooks and cross checks and holds are routinely called. There's accountability among the League, players, coaches, officials and general managers. Everything is seen, recorded, logged and reviewed.

"I have to give Gary credit in the sense that he allowed me to do this job and supported me," Campbell said. "After we came up with the plan in 2004-05, it was hard to deliver on that. That wasn't easy calling 15 penalties on each team and trying to get it right was really difficult."

Campbell said the NHL is now at a point where the question is, how perfect do you want the game to be?

The answer is what comes next.

"He loves the game and he respects the game, and he wants the game to be the best it can be," said former Rangers forward Adam Graves, who played under Campbell in Detroit and New York and remains close to him and his family. "Certainly, the game has benefitted from his dedication and his love for the game. It shows. The game has never been better. It's an amazing game. I can't tell you how much I love the game now. It also seems to be getting better. Colin has been a big part of pushing the game to where it is today."