Inside the NHL Draft floor experience

There is no larger gathering of the hockey community than the NHL Draft. Somewhere in the host arena, you will find: 32 club front offices and their teams of scouts and support staff; the NHL’s brass and its hockey ops and event staff; a large number of NHL owners; broadcasters and analysts from multiple countries; every agent who is anyone in the business; and of course, the next generation of hockey stars.

It’s a hockey who’s who. The first time I attended the Draft in Buffalo in 2016, I stepped into an elevator to find Steve Yzerman, Joe Sakic and Gary Bettman staring back at me. Two Hall of Famers and the grand poobah. It became clear to me pretty quickly that it was one of the biggest weekends on the hockey calendar.

Walking around the building, you immediately notice the players and their families. Beaming parents walking beside nervous-looking kids wearing ill-fitting suits for the first or second time in their lives, sometimes accompanied by girlfriends in cocktail dresses and heels that arenas don’t usually see unless Beyonce is on tour. As these families make their way down to their seats, it’s hard not to imagine what they must be thinking. The lives of their sons, and in many ways, their own lives, are about to change forever. You can actually feel the anticipation.

In the hours leading up to the Draft, team executives start to surface on the arena floor. Execs work the room, saying their hellos, patting each other on the back and maybe making one more attempt to pry a pick out of a team’s hands with a last-ditch trade proposal. Generally, though, teams head into Day 1 of the Draft with a plan, and it’s very unlikely that the plan changes before the first name is selected. That said, if a deal has been discussed leading up to the Draft, it may very well get the final stamp of approval in those final minutes before the clock starts.

After the flesh has been pressed, team executives slowly take their seats at their designated table. The matter of who sits at the table is a delicate decision-making process. There isn’t room for all executives and scouts, so the GM needs to make decisions as to who needs to be at the table from a workflow standpoint and who else gets to be there from a reward or status standpoint. I know of one team whose staffers won’t ever forget the time a scout took a seat at the table when it was intended for a senior management member of the club. As the Draft commenced, he refused to relinquish the chair. Not wanting to cause a scene, the management member retreated to the team’s suite. Let’s hope that scout enjoyed his view from the floor because rumor has it he wasn’t part of the organization on Day 2.

Seating drama aside, the first night of the Draft is showtime! It’s a made-for-television event, with a packed house of boisterous fans in attendance, team highlight videos on the screen and media interviews in every corner of the building. It feels like more should happen than 32 walks to the stage and 32 picks. Fans want blockbuster trades and pick movement around the board, but all too often the first round unfolds without drama. It’s so rare that a top-10 pick gets traded at the Draft that the event can sometimes fall a little flat, but your job as a team is to make the best possible pick for your franchise, not to deliver excitement to the fans.

The first night of the Draft is a scout’s Super Bowl, the culmination of a year of effort, and it’s why most teams go out of their way to ensure as many scouts as possible get to go up on stage and have some recognition during the announcement of the team’s first pick.

Day 2 of Draft weekend is all business. Only a smattering of hardcore fans are in the building, and many of the players who will be drafted after the second round won’t be in attendance. It’s a grind of six rounds in approximately six hours. With a pick every few minutes, team staffers won’t get out of their chairs all day except for a couple of nature breaks. When it comes to eating and drinking, every team employs a “runner,” usually a pre-teen who has some connection to the team or has won a contest to experience the Draft while working to fetch scouts and executives their sustenance for the day: water, coffee, chips and granola bars are the usual fare. Assembling the 32 proud young runners wearing their team jerseys for the runner photo is one of the most adorable and authentic moments you will see at the Draft.

As technology plays a greater role in the Draft, there is less movement around the room while the proceedings are being conducted. Gone are the days when General Managers would walk up to another team’s table to talk turkey with his counterpart, lest there be a flood of media rumours about the massive trade about to go down. Instead, most of the discussions are conducted by cell phone and text message, even though the recipient may be 20 feet away. At the very least, you can see if they are ducking your calls!

Technology also plays a role in the pick process. Every eligible player is listed in an NHL database that each team uses as a cross-reference point with their own lists. A few years ago, we realized that once a team signalled its pick was in, the name would disappear from the NHL database. My colleague, Jonathan Wall, who co-ordinated our communications with the league during the Draft, started to regularly search through the names that might be a team’s next target, and when one of those names disappeared, he would tell us who was picked a minute or so before it was actually announced. It perhaps gave us a few additional seconds of advantage if we were picking next, but mostly it was just fun to always be ahead of the news.

While scouts focused on the next best-available player on their lists, management would ponder a myriad of trades. Like all teams in this era, we had a chart that assigned a theoretical value to all picks in the Draft. That way, you could make a mathematical determination as to whether trading, for example, pick number 46 for pick number 57 and number 198 made sense. Trading down in the lower rounds to get additional picks always seemed like a smart play when it gave you surplus value according to the chart. More darts to throw at the dart board, with better overall mathematical odds.

When trades involving actual players do happen at the Draft, it’s not high-tech but rather, old-school all the way. Representatives from each team are asked to meet with NHL officials in some dressing room that has been converted to a makeshift NHL Central Registry office, and an in-person trade “call” is effectively carried out. Once the boxes have been ticked, the trade can move forward. No announcement on the floor will happen before Central Registry has blessed the trade.

It’s worth noting that more deals than just trades get carried out on Draft weekend. Given that front offices and agents are all in the same place, more than a few extensions get done during the weekend. I remember meeting agent Pat Morris outside a concession stand in Chicago’s United Center during the fourth or fifth round of the Draft to hammer out Jacob Markstrom’s 2017 restricted free agent contract. The deal still had to go back to Jacob and our GM for final approval, but we probably could have grabbed beers from the concession stand and toasted the deal.

When all 224 picks are said and done, team officials gather in their reserved suites to meet with the draftees and their families and celebrate the culmination of their work. It’s a weekend that leaves a lasting imprint not only on the drafted prospects, but on anyone else fortunate enough to be a part of it.

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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 the NHL Draft floor experience

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