Marty Walsh potentially in line for NHL Player’s Association top job, reports say

According to reporters, Marty Walsh could be in the running for the top job for the National Hockey League Players Union.

The likes of ESPN on the sports media side and Politico on the political side have both confirmed a TSN report that the NHL Players Association’s search for a new executive director is focused on Walsh, the current US Secretary of Labor and former mayor of Boston.

The NHLPA meets this week in Florida to determine who will be its next general manager after Don Fehr leaves after 12 years; Walsh, a longtime labor leader, is said to be a finalist and potentially the frontrunner, although others are under consideration, according to ESPN.

Walsh is a huge Boston sports fan. Indeed, part of his personal history intersects with the Bruins – in his discussions of sobriety, he cites a case in 1995 when he got kicked out of a B game in the old Boston Garden as part of a a weekend in which he says he hit rock bottom.

The Dorchester Laborers 223 union official has been sober since, won a state representative seat two years later and continued his political rise from there.

In 2013, then Boston’s building trades chief and still a state representative, Walsh won the Boston mayoral election. He will be re-elected in 2017.

He was preparing to run for a third term in 2021 when, after months of him and his advisers playing coy and brushing aside rumors in a way that Wednesday’s rumor mills heard, President Biden appointed him Secretary of the Department of Work.

Walsh has served in that role ever since, working as an advocate for the president’s economic agenda and being called upon to successfully help deal with labor issues such as two impending railroad strikes and a potential Major League Baseball lockout.

Walsh’s tenure as secretary has largely avoided any trip to the penalty box, though his seven-plus years in charge of Boston have had a few federal investigations, including two federal investigations into allegations that City Hall allegedly been involved in heavy-handed tactics to force events to use the union. Workforce.

He continues to split his time between Boston and Washington, DC, and has been known to continue making calls on local issues in the Hub ever since.

The NHLPA is headquartered in Toronto, according to its website.

It comes after Walsh’s former friend, Governor Charlie Baker, took a seat at the helm of the NCAA.