A few years ago representatives of the National Hockey League Players Association, known hereafter as the hockey union, approached Michael Weiner about becoming its executive director. Weiner at the time was general counsel of the Major League Baseball Players Association, known hereafter as the baseball union.

Weiner passed on the opportunity, preferring to stay with the baseball union. It was the intelligent decision because last December he became executive director of the best sports union in creation.

The hockey union, however, has not failed in its quest to get a general counsel from the baseball union. That was the position Donald Fehr held before he became executive director of the baseball union in 1983, and now Fehr is on the verge of becoming the hockey union’s executive director.

Fehr and the union’s executive board must still work out terms and conditions of a contract, and the union’s executive board has to approve him. But all of that is expected to happen in the next 10 days or so.

The union has been in such a state of discombobulation for years that the players are most likely prepared to give Fehr whatever he wants, including salary, to insure that he will take the job.

Upon his acceptance and approval, Fehr will instantly upgrade the credibility and stature of the union and put N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman on notice that he won’t have the union to kick around anymore.

Fehr, 62 years old, has decided to take the job despite what appears to be unanimous advice from friends and former associates to reject it and stay sane.

Marvin Miller, the master of all sports unions’ heads and Fehr’s boss with the baseball union, said Wednesday he hadn’t spoken to Fehr recently but had heard from others that he was leaning toward accepting the hockey players’ offer to lead their labor efforts.

“A long time ago,” Miller related, “I said I think it’s great that you’re helping them, but you have to have your head examined taking the job. You can help them, but accepting the job would be crazy. These are people who haven’t created a legitimate union but have prevented themselves from doing it.

“How many executive directors have they had in just a few years time? They don’t know what they want at this point. Knowing what he knows, there’s no way he should do it.”

What the players want is Fehr, who quickly appealed to them after he agreed to help them find a new director. As friends and former associates have pointed out, he doesn’t need the job, but he’s not ready to retire from all forms of work, and as he himself once noted, former heads of unions have limited opportunities and are not attractive to employers.

But that doesn’t mean Fehr has to take a job that some people would see is hopeless. He obviously has his reasons for doing it. One may be Miller himself.

Fehr, who worked with Miller and later did the job that Miller created, had a front-row seat in watching Miller wield his deft labor hand not only in negotiations with the clubs but also in his education of the players in the ways of negotiations and the importance of union unity.

Fehr, who lived through two mammoth baseball strikes (1981, 1994-95), has had plenty of negotiating experience, but he hasn’t built a union as Miller did and may feel he could do that with the rag-tag hockey union.

“He has another challenge in him,” a friend of Fehr said, “and this is a challenge and a half.”

The union has a disastrous history with executive directors. Fehr would be a welcome change.

Alan Eagleson was the first head of the players’ union, beginning at about the same time as Miller took control of the baseball union (1966). While Miller did his job brilliantly, Eagleson landed in prison.

Ted Saskin, who replaced Eagleson’s replacement, Bob Goodenow, who left in the face of the lost season of 2004-05, was ousted after he was accused of illegally intercepting players’ e-mail. Paul Kelly, a former prosecutor who prosecuted Eagleson in Boston, succeeded Saskin, then was ousted in a power struggle between two factions of players.

Fehr comes in with a clean slate, or should come in with a clean slate, but he hasn’t even assumed the position and he already has detractors. One is an espn.com N.H.L. blogger, Scott Burnside, who demonstrates an ignorance about his subject that I encountered in 1994, when I covered N.H.L. labor negotiations.

With one exception, the hockey writers knew very little about what was happening and cared less. The exception was a Canadian reporter named Alan Adams, who was as good a sports reporter as I ever encountered.

In Burnside’s blog, he questions whether Fehr is the right man for the job and suggests he committed a conflict of interest by taking the job when he had been aiding the search committee.

“Even if the players had to persuade a semi-reluctant Fehr to take the job, there is something unseemly about the process,” he writes without showing an awareness that what happened in this instance is not unusual.

He also expresses concern about Fehr’s strike history, writing, “There is already some hand-wringing about whether Fehr will lead the players into another labor stoppage at the end of the 2011-12 season, something anyone who lived through the 2004-05 lockout knows simply cannot happen.”

Who is wringing his hands, Gary Bettman, the commissioner, who has gleefully run roughshod over the players? “The players can’t stand Bettman,´said a person who is close to people on both sides of the labor fence.

The blogger also writes that under Fehr’s watch, “the game’s reputation has been permanently soiled,” sounding like one of those steroids zealots who keep making themselves look and sound trying to make baseball look bad.

But my favorite line in the blog is this one: “Fehr, of course, isn’t a hockey guy and, not having been around for 2004, perhaps lacks the appropriate sensitivities needed to avoid a similar disaster.”

Eagleson was “a hockey guy.” Saskin was “a hockey guy.” And in case the blogger’s knowledge of sports history is limited to hockey, he should know that the 1994 baseball strike led to the cancellation of that year’s World Series. The way I see it one missed World Series is at least as bad as, if not worse, than one missed hockey season.