Who runs the 31 NHL teams and where did they come from?

You might not know the names of all 31 General Managers, but even if you don’t, many are familiar.  When you look at the list of them, you’ll note that a lot of these men played hockey.  There seem to be three main routes to the executive suites in NHL teams: come off an NHL bench, have four years of NCAA hockey and presumably a degree in some useful field or be a lawyer that ended up working for a team at some time.

A lot of these men have been in charge of AHL teams or junior teams before they got the top job. And you will note that there is a lot of similarity in age and therefore era of playing career.  Lou Lamoriello is the only one whose playing career was in the sixties.

NHL General Managers as of June 1, 2017

No two NHL teams seem to use the same organizational structure.  Some, like the Leafs, have a president in Brendan Shanahan who is very involved in the team.  Some have other managerial positions above the GM, who aren’t hockey people and are largely not visible outside the team.

Some teams have a whole room full of Assistant Genaral Managers, and some fired them all and haven’t replaced any yet.  Which is fine, Buffalo. It’s fine to be a few days from the expansion draft and not really have a management team or a coach or anything.

We’ve included some assistants to the GM, not to be confused with AGM, just to show you how complex the divvying up of responsibility is.

Some ages were impossible to get, as the AGM ranks are where the lawyers start showing up.  They don’t have every bit of their vital statistics on the internet.  Some dates of hire have been rounded off for simplicity.

About those ages.  Were you expecting the AGMs to be a lot younger than the GMs?  Well, they aren’t.  Demographics may have something to do with that.  At 50 or so, you aren’t a baby boomer, so you’ve spent your career looking at the massive crowd of people just a bit older holding down all the jobs.

NHL Assistant General Managers as of June 1, 2017

If you find any glaring errors, let us know and we’ll correct them, but also, what do you see in these lists of the brains running all the teams?