Should Canada’s Olympic team be run by a non-NHL general manager?

Hockey Canada announced its men’s roster for the 2026 Winter Olympics on Wednesday. While most people are in favor of the players that have been picked to don the red and white in Milan in February, some are curious to see what the team would look like if an “outsider” were in charge.

For the past few years, St. Louis Blues general manager Doug Armstrong has been the GM of the senior men’s national team. It has made sense, since he was the GM of the Canadian team that won the World Cup of Hockey in 2016. It certainly can provide some tedious days trying to run an NHL team, while also ensuring that a national team is set up for success as well.

While Canada has used other people to be the GMs of national teams for other events, it hasn’t had a person, who wasn’t also a GM of an NHL team, since Wayne Gretzky tried running it back with Team Canada at the 2006 Olympics in Turin (and we all know how bad that went).

On Wednesday’s edition of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Jason Gregor joined Tyler Yaremchuk to discuss whether Canada should have a non-NHL GM in charge.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Are we ever going to get to a point where maybe Hockey Canada goes the route of what they do in international soccer, which is the people who run these programs, especially if we’re going to get into the rhythm where there’s best-on-best hockey every two years, hopefully with a World Cup of Hockey and Olympics in two years and continuing on like that – do we maybe need to get to a point where Hockey Canada just appoints a few people who have nothing to do with an NHL organization? If it wasn’t Doug Armstrong running this thing, if it was a non-partial third party, someone who just works for Hockey Canada and only Hockey Canada, maybe some decisions are a little bit different with this team?

Jason Gregor: Do you need a full-time guy? Where are you paying them? Where’s the money coming from to be a full-time thing? Personally, I think it would be a waste of money, right? There’s lots of other places they can put their money. They sure as hell don’t need a full-time general manager. They’re pretty top-heavy as it is in Hockey Canada. … Let’s be honest here. We could put most people who watched the game would get the top 12 or 15 guys without much conversation. Then you come to the rest. And it’s really, you know, it’s depth and it’s opinion. And would it ultimately matter? I don’t know. When was the last time a depth guy scored a massive goal for Canada? … I don’t know if we need a full-time GM for something like this.

You can watch the full segment and entire episode here…