Deputy commissioner Bill Daly said Wednesday that the NHL's independent investigation into the alleged Team Canada incident of 2018 is "moving along" and that the league will do a "thorough, comprehensive job."
"I'm hesitant to give a timeline because I just don’t know how long it's going to take," Daly told Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek during the NHL's European media tour stop in Paris. "It's moving along. In a perfect world, we'd love to have finality or resolution before training camp. But is that going to happen? Actually, at this point, I don’t think it will. We're going to do a thorough, comprehensive job, and we'll see where that leads us."
Daly added that interviews were scheduled this week in the investigation, and that so far the NHL is getting full participation. That participation includes the woman, who, on April 20, filed a $3.55-million lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court in London, Ont., saying she was sexually assaulted by eight players after a Hockey Canada Foundation event on June 19, 2018. The woman did not name the players, some of whom were part of the 2017-18 Canadian world junior roster, referring to them in the statement of claim as John Does 1-8. (The matter has not been heard in court.)
Daly said the woman, referred to in a statement of claim settled by Hockey Canada earlier this year as E.M., has participated in a "kind of defined way." E.M.'s lawyer, Rob Talach, has said previously his client has recently provided an eight-page statement, plus photos and texts to London police, Hockey Canada's third-party investigators and the NHL.
Jared Maples, a former CIA, U.S. Department of Defense and Homeland Security employee who joined the NHL as executive vice-president, chief security officer, on June 7, 2021, is leading the investigation for the league.
The full interview with Daly can be found in an upcoming edition of 32 Thoughts: The Podcast.
--with files from Sportsnet's Paul D. Grant
