Inside pre-draft scouting meetings: why ‘fighting’ is a good thing

Whether fighting has a place in NHL ice rinks is a topic that has long been debated. Whether fighting has a place in NHL scouting boardrooms should not be open to debate. Good fights lead to good process. And good process leads to good drafting.

I’m not talking about fisticuffs or the hurling of insults and profanity across the room. I’m talking about scouts “fighting” for players, pounding the table with conviction and emphatically putting their judgment on the line for the players they believe in.

Teams essentially draft from a list of players that have been carefully constructed and curated over the course of the season. It’s a list that originates midway through the season and then gets revised (even overhauled) as the season progresses. Then, just as it becomes close to final, teams hold intensive pre-draft meetings, where the list undergoes yet another makeover, getting poked, prodded, massaged and tweaked again. I’ve seen names move up or down a list the night before the draft, long after any player has played his final game of the season.

To say it’s a fluid process would be an understatement. And while consensus among your scouting staff is the ultimate goal, the place where a player ends up on the list has everything to do with the fights that happen in the hockey ops boardrooms. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they call them war rooms.

It’s almost impossible for any single scout to be familiar with, let alone have a solid opinion on, all the draft-eligible talent across the globe. To manage travel and the sheer volume of players to be viewed, teams divide their scouting personnel across the various amateur leagues in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

Within Canada, you might have scouts focused entirely on one of the Western Hockey League, Ontario Hockey League or Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. In the U.S., the focus may be on different regions within the USHL (which includes the vaunted US National Team Development Program) or even high school hockey in states with significant programs like Minnesota. In Europe, scouts need to cover off leagues in Russia, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Czechia, for starters, let alone combing the far reaches of Latvia, Belarus, Switzerland, Austria and other nations where the game is played.

The increased availability of quality broadcasts and file-sharing apps and websites has led to greater ease of video scouting. Fewer scouts can watch more games without the physical toll and financial expense of travel. NHL teams’ analytics groups are also now adept at identifying and targeting players in less visible leagues to make informed predictions about how that player’s game would translate to a different league or what current NHL players had similar size, speed, abilities or trajectory.

Regardless of what combination of boots on the ground or eyes in the sky a team uses, it takes a lot of resources to make sure that there is an opinion somewhere in the organization on every player who might be in a position to be drafted. Getting viewings on every player is half the battle, but then you need to be able to distinguish among all the players and reduce them to a number on the list.

That’s where the battles come in. It can take hours of discussion to land on whether a guy should be, say, 15^th or 16^th on the list. And then sometimes the guy who was in 18^th gets moved to 14^th because someone fights hard for him, and the entire list moves with him.

When the regional scouts are deadlocked, the tie is usually broken by what teams often refer to as “crossover scouts,” the more senior scouts who are tasked with seeing games in multiple regions so as to be in a position to compare the various leagues and the players who have caught the regional scouts’ eyes. This task has also been facilitated by the now-relative ease of video scouting. The crossover scouts, along with the director of amateur scouting and sometimes the general manager, ultimately have to weigh their own knowledge of the players with the arguments they are hearing from the regional scouts to arrive at a decision.

Most front office executives won’t have seen many of the draft prospects outside the first round, so their role in the scouting meetings, aside from taking in all the information, is to set criteria and facilitate solid process rather than to provide player input. Sometimes stronger personalities in the room will dominate the conversation, and it is up to the executives to notice which scouts are being quiet and to ensure their opinions are solicited. When a quieter scout speaks up for a player without prompting, you know they have strong conviction for the player.

It can be an interesting experience to watch scouts hotly debate players that you haven’t seen play. There can be a lot of generic description of player attributes that is not very enlightening. Hearing general commentary such as, “He has a good shot,” “He has good hockey sense” or “He’s a great skater” would start to mean absolutely nothing to me, but hearing comments like “this player has the best edge work I’ve ever seen, period” (referring to Quinn Hughes) would cause me to take notice.

Finding unique ways to describe a player or to single out qualities that separate him from others is the key to convincing the crossover scouts, amateur scouting director and hockey executive to advance the player up the list. Often, however, it becomes less about what scouts say about a player and more about how they say it. The more passion they bring, and the more they defend against opposing viewpoints, the more you know this was a player a scout is willing to stake their reputation on.

When scouts get passionate and exercised, or start to argue about which player deserves to be higher on the list, that’s when things get interesting and productive. In the meetings leading up to the 2017 draft, when I was with the Vancouver Canucks, I remember discussions about Cale Makar. He was playing in the AJHL, a league that would not normally produce first-round draft pick material. Everyone could see he was talented, but many in the room argued that despite his talent, he wasn’t deserving to be ranked highly on our list because of the weaker level of competition he faced. Those that had seen him play most frequently, however, insisted that he was special. They had to stand up and speak with conviction about their belief in him, and why he should be placed higher, than say, defensemen from more traditional talent pools of the Finnish league (Miro Heiskanen), Swedish Hockey League (Erik Brannstrom) or CHL (Cal Foote). Makar was ultimately picked before our position in the Draft, but the arguments around the table ensured that he was slotted into the right place on our list had he been available.

It’s the easy path for scouts to describe a player, lay out his attributes, and let the group dynamic unfold to slot the player in somewhere on the list. Scouts don’t want to be proven wrong or look foolish, as missing on a player can be more of an imprint on a scout’s career than picking the sure thing. The best scouts, however, are the ones willing to stick their necks out and fight the fight. As an example, those around the Canucks’ war room who vigorously insisted that the wafer-thin Elias Pettersson would be a better player than the brick-walled Cody Glass weren’t putting forward the easy take, but it was the right one, and their belief and willingness to stand behind it ensured that the Canucks indeed got the right man.

Scouting departments won’t always make the right call, but if they are willing to have constructive, impassioned dialogue that welcomes argument and avoids group-think, they are halfway there.

We’ve all heard the expression, “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.” Each draft season, those words should be printed on a banner and hung in every war room across the league.

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Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.

Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.

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Inside pre-draft scouting meetings: why ‘fighting’ is a good thing

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