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

Aug 21, 2023

Marty Walsh may be in line to score the top job for the National Hockey League players union, according to reporters.

The likes of ESPN on the sports-media side and Politico on the politics side both confirmed a report from TSN that the NHL Players Association's search for a new executive director is focusing in on Walsh, the current U.S. Labor secretary and former mayor of Boston.

The NHLPA is meeting this week in Florida to hash out who its next executive director will be after Don Fehr steps down after 12 years; Walsh, a longtime labor leader, is reportedly a finalist and potentially the frontrunner, though others are under consideration, per ESPN.

Walsh is a big Boston sports fan. Indeed, part of his personal story crosses with the Bruins — in his discussions about getting sober, he cites an instance in 1995 of getting thrown out of a B's game in the old Boston Garden as part of a weekend bender in which he says he hit rock bottom.

The then-Laborers 223 union official from Dorchester has been sober ever since, won election to a state rep seat two years later and continued his political ascendence from there.

In 2013, by that point head of the Boston Building Trades and still a state representative, Walsh won election as mayor of Boston. He’d be re-elected in 2017.

He was gearing up to run for a third term in 2021 when, after months of him and his advisers playing coy and swatting away rumors in a way that Wednesday's rumors hearkened back to, President Biden named him secretary of the Department of Labor.

Walsh has held that position since, working as an advocate for the president's economic agenda and being called in to successfully help settle labor issues such as two impending rail strikes and a potential Major League Baseball lockout.

Walsh's tenure as secretary largely has avoided any trips to the penalty box, though his seven-plus years leading Boston had a few, most notably two federal investigations into allegations that City Hall had been involved in strong-arm tactics to force events to use union labor.

He continues to split time between Boston and Washington, D.C., and has been known to continue to make calls about local issues in the Hub since.

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

This comes after Walsh's friend former Gov. Charlie Baker took a seat helming the NCAA.

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