According to ESPN, U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh will become the new executive director of the National Hockey League Players Association.
Walsh, 55, succeeds Donald Fehr, who led the NHLPA from 2010 to 2015 and negotiated two collective bargaining agreements with NHL owners on their behalf. According to an NHLPA source, the formal announcement of Walsh’s hiring will come in the days following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Walsh was designated as the “designated survivor” for Tuesday’s speech, which he watched from an undisclosed location. The goal is to keep the government’s line of succession intact in the event of an attack or other incident at the Capitol, where the president, vice president, speaker of the House, and the rest are present Biden’s Cabinet was assembled.
Walsh had a labour background before joining the Biden administration, having led the Building and Construction Trades Council in Boston. He was mayor of Boston for two terms, from 2014 to 2021. Walsh is a Boston Bruins season ticket holder and a lifelong hockey fan.
The NHLPA formed a seven-player committee to search for Fehr’s replacement in April 2022. Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive search firm, was eventually hired by the committee.
Marty Walsh
Former Vancouver Canucks general manager Mike Gillis was one of the candidates, as was Mathieu Schneider, a former NHL defenseman who is now the assistant to the executive director under Fehr, and player agent Allan Walsh.
Marty Walsh arrived late in the game. According to ESPN, the players wanted someone who hadn’t been involved in hockey labour talks to bring fresh eyes to the situation.
“The players didn’t want anyone with any industry experience or preconceived notions about [NHL commissioner] Gary Bettman,” said one player source.
Bettman said at Saturday’s NHL All-Star Game in Florida that commenting on Walsh would be “inappropriate” because he had not yet been named NHLPA president.
“The truth is that we are extremely respectful of what the players are doing. They will carry out the procedure as they see fit. We’ll work with whoever it is “said Bettman, who claimed to have met Walsh on several occasions when he was mayor of Boston.
Walsh has no ties to the hockey labour movement, but he does have ties to NHL ownership. Jeremy Jacobs, owner of the Boston Bruins, contributed to Walsh’s mayoral campaigns and hosted a fundraiser at TD Garden, which the Jacobs family owns. The Jacobses made their “largest ever political contribution to a candidate in Massachusetts” to Walsh in 2017, according to the Boston Globe.