The National Hockey League has appointed its first Black manager to the United States men’s national team.
According to NHL, Florida Panthers assistant general manager Brett Peterson, 42, was named to the position on Thursday. He called it “a great honor” and expressed his eagerness to bring together a group of “fantastic individuals” to see what they could achieve.
“I’m very happy that our game and our sport continues to evolve and grow where there can be ‘firsts’ and ‘seconds’ and ‘thirds,’” said Peterson. “I think it just speaks to what USA Hockey has done, creating opportunities for so many different people to play the game, myself included, and then to continue to fall in love with it and continue to want to chase our dreams to the highest level.”
Florida Panthers assistant general manager Brett Peterson will lead the 2024 United States men’s national hockey team, the first Black man appointed to the position. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube.com/NBC Sports)
Peterson joined the Panthers’ front office after working as a player agent and as Wasserman Media Group’s vice president of hockey. John Vanbiesbrouck, USA Hockey’s associate executive director of hockey operations, said Peterson “has done a terrific job in helping build the Florida Panthers” since becoming assistant general manager on Nov. 17, 2020.
During Peterson’s tenure, the Panthers qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs three times and advanced to the 2023 Stanley Cup Final, where the Vegas Golden Knights defeated them in five games.
After four seasons as a defender at Boston College from 2000 to 2004, where he helped the Eagles win the 2001 NCAA Division I national title, Peterson began his sports representation career in 2009 with Acme World Sports.
According to NHL, he played in 340 minor-league games and was part of a group that helped establish an all-Black and Hispanic NextGen AAA Foundation squad that won its division in the renowned 2020 Beantown Summer Classic. Mike Grier, who became the NHL’s first Black general manager when the San Jose Sharks hired him on July 5, 2022, and Bryce Salvador, currently a Devils television commentator, coached the squad.
“We are really excited to have Brett as the general manager of our men’s national team,” Vanbiesbrouck stated, referring to Peterson’s broad knowledge of the overall talent pool, which will be extremely helpful in assembling the roster for the 2024 IIHF World Championship.
The U.S. will compete in Group B and play their preliminary round games — along with France, Germany, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Sweden — in Prague and Ostrava, Czech Republic, on May 10-26, 2024.
Group A includes Austria, Canada, Finland, Great Britain, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Norway.
The U.S. finished fourth in the 2023 World Championship in Tampere, Finland, and Riga, Latvia, losing the bronze medal game 4-3 in overtime to Latvia. It has won four bronze medals in the last 10 tournaments — in 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2021.
Peterson maintained that he wants the 2024 team to be a fun group of varied personalities who want to play the game correctly, be competitive, play fast and “really push the envelope and represent our country on the stage where I feel like we can show the world just how much we’ve improved our hockey over the years.”
The United States Men’s National Team Advisory Group, led by Vanbiesbrouck and including Grier and nine other NHL general managers, will help assemble the roster.
“For me, this is just another opportunity to learn from a very established group of gentlemen,” said Peterson, NHL reported. “Some of them I know well, some of them I know kind of well, and get to know what their thought processes are on things and, hopefully, continue to use that in my own growth and development as I continue to improve as an assistant GM.”
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