Do you feel the commissioner also has to be the lead attorney? Or whatever the titles could be…maybe lead counsel? Whatever they’re called. The blues, I’m guessing, don’t rely on Armstrong for the legal minutia.
My basis for the guess is that the owners are picking a representative. That’s 100% the job in my eyes. Having the attorney be one in the same is convenient but, imo, not critical.
First, the term is "general counsel". That's the person who is in charge of the company's legal department. "lead counsel" is the term on a lawsuit with multiple lawyers - the lead counsel is the person "in charge" of the litigation. I could go down a whole rabbit hole about the split between corporate lawyers and litigation lawyers (or solicitors and barristers in Canada) but that's not important now.
It of course doesn't matter whether I think the Commissioner needs to be a lawyer or not. But I am pointing out that the Commissioner of every one of the big four sports is a lawyer. And almost all of the prior Commissioners going back a number of years for all sports have been lawyers. Leading candidate Bill Daly is a lawyer.
Now that being said - the jobs of Commissioner and General Counsel are different jobs, and you would not have the same person in both roles. That gets into some complicated rules about solicitor-client privilege - legal communications from General Counsel can be privileged, and thus maybe protected from being turned over in case of a lawsuit, while the Commissioner would not be protected.
But - having someone familiar with the law can still be helpful, even if someone like Bettman isn't actually working as a lawyer when he's the Commissioner.
Doug would serve as a steward. The role is navigate the owners. I think he has a chance at that papal ceremony. What other process besides the pope’s selection would be similar to what is about to happen?
I think any of the folk who currently represent ownership groups in some capacity have the leg in the door to enter the process as a candidate. I’d imagine there will be internal and external candidates considered. Doug seems to have a large amount of power. It may be enough. He brought two ownership groups cups and seems to work well with the group of Canadian gms insomuch as there isn’t a bunch of drama around team building. (Except u20 which is a different group)
Again the idea that being part of an ownership group makes you more likely - none of the existing Commissioners in the Big 4 were associated with an ownership group. The only one I could find was Bud Selig at least in recent-ish history.
The issue is whether other owners want a commissioner who they might be afraid is too tightly connected to one of their rivals. I suspect there's a reason why all the big league commissioners have mostly come up through the league office itself.
The league appointing a hockey ops guy to commissioner would be akin to Boeing appointing an Engineer to its board chair. We saw what happens when investment managers run engineering companies.
Problem is fundamentally engineering and business are fundamentally different.
Now there's value to having someone who has experience in both areas. Boeing's current CEO (a guy named Kelly Ortberg) was trained as an engineer and started his career in engineering - but had been in management since at least 2001 before being made CEO in 2024.
I know in my own area (law) - you're never going to see a non-lawyer in charge of a very large law firm. But those in charge of very large law firms tend to have a great deal of management experience before being named as Managing Partner.
