The NHL Players’ Association is eyeing four U.S. cities in which to open a satellite office, and a union-hired executive search firm has identified 20 to 25 potential candidates to take the top marketing job for the union, said NHLPA Executive Director Paul Kelly.
New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles would be considered as locations for the new U.S. office of the Toronto-based NHLPA, with New York being the front-runner, Kelly said.
“It would make logical sense for us to have a New York presence,” he said, noting that players share in league revenue under the current labor deal and that the NHL’s headquarters is in New York.
Chicago-based Reilly Partners, an executive search firm that conducted the search in which Kelly was chosen for the top NHLPA job last year, has identified about two dozen candidates to head the proposed U.S. marketing arm of the union, including marketing executives from major sports leagues, sports marketing firms, television and entertainment firms. Kelly would not identify any of the candidates, but said some were from “the Hollywood area” as well as New York.
Kelly acknowledged that the city in which the new marketing executive lives could be a factor, but would by no means be a determining factor in where the NHLPA opens its U.S. office. The new U.S. marketing executive will report to Mike Ouellet, the NHLPA’s chief of business affairs.
Kelly, a former criminal defense attorney and assistant U.S. attorney, was hired to head the NHLPA in October, after former NHLPA Executive Director Ted Saskin was fired for reading private e-mails sent by players through their nhlpa.com accounts. Kelly is charged with bringing together a union that is still recovering from both Saskin’s firing and the 2004-05 NHL lockout.
Under the collective-bargaining agreement that ended the lockout, the players have the option of reopening the labor deal after the 2008-09 season. Whether the players will exercise the option is “too early to tell,” Kelly said. The NHLPA will hold meetings this summer at which players will review the CBA and the finances of the league, he said.
Kelly said reports that he vowed there would be no work stoppage under his administration were inaccurate.
“What I said was the players intend to strike a constructive relationship with the management of hockey,” Kelly said. “We think it is in the best interests of players to work in good faith, in a cooperative way, with the owners. It is my view that another lockout would be very damaging to the sport.
“But,” Kelly added, “the moment the NHL owners try to take advantage of the players or fail to conduct themselves in the same, good-faith manner that we at the association intend to conduct ourselves, we would consider every alternative, including a work stoppage.”
