With Doug Armstrong officially stepping down as general manager of the St. Louis Blues, the NHL’s longest-tenured general manager title now belongs to Winnipeg Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff, the only man who has ever held that role in the Jets’ modern era.
Armstrong’s time as Blues GM came to an end as of July 1, with former Blues forward Alexander Steen taking over as the club’s new general manager. Armstrong will remain with the organization as president of hockey operations through 2029.
Advertisement
His tenure in St. Louis was one of the most decorated in recent NHL history, highlighted by the Blues’ first Stanley Cup championship in 2019, but his departure clears the way for a new era in St. Louis and reshuffles the hierarchy of the league’s longest-serving front office executives in the process.
Cheveldayoff has led the Jets since June 8, 2011, when he was hired to build the hockey club that was relocating from Atlanta to Winnipeg ahead of the 2011-12 season. Fifteen years later, he remains the only general manager the Jets 2.0 era has ever known, a run of organizational continuity that is virtually unheard of in professional hockey.
The numbers over that stretch paint a picture of a franchise that has built itself into a consistent contender. Since taking over in the 2011-12 season, the Jets have compiled a 610-438-111 regular season record, good for the 11th-best mark in the NHL over that span and tied with the Tampa Bay Lightning for tenth-best team defence with a 2.80 goals-against average per game.
Offensively, the Jets have ranked 13th in the league during that stretch with a 2.96 goals per game average, figures that reflect a franchise that has prioritized defensive structure while gradually building out its offensive depth.
Advertisement
Much of that success traces back to Cheveldayoff’s ability to identify and develop elite talent through the draft. He drafted Mark Scheifele, Adam Lowry, Jacob Trouba, Connor Hellebuyck, Nikolaj Ehlers, Josh Morrissey, Kyle Connor and Dylan Samberg, and oversaw their development into key pieces of the franchise’s core.
What separates Cheveldayoff’s tenure from many of his contemporaries, however, is not just the ability to find that talent but the capacity to build a culture and an environment that convinced those players to stay. Scheifele, Hellebuyck, Morrissey and Connor have all committed to long-term futures in Winnipeg, a feat that is particularly notable given the market challenges that come with playing in a smaller Canadian city.
The Jets advanced to the Western Conference Final for the first time in franchise history in 2018 and won the Presidents trophy in the 2024-25 season with a 56-win campaign. That sustained competitiveness has allowed the Jets to make the playoffs in seven of the last nine seasons, cementing their standing as one of the league’s perennial contenders rather than a boom-and-bust franchise.
Advertisement
With Armstrong’s departure, Cheveldayoff is now the NHL’s longest-tenured general manager, a milestone that speaks to both his track record and the trust True North Sports and Entertainment has placed in him over a decade and a half of building the franchise from the ground up.
Whether his next chapter brings the one prize that has so far eluded him and the Jets, a Stanley Cup, will be the defining question of an already remarkable run at the helm of one of the NHL’s most loyally supported franchises.
Image
For action-packed issues, access to the entire magazine archive and a free issue, subscribe to The Hockey News at THN.com/free. Get the latest news and trending stories by subscribing to our newsletter here. And share your thoughts by commenting below the article on THN.com or creating your own post in our community forum.
Read the full article here