In the fifth round of the 2007 NHL Draft, the Dallas Stars selected Jamie Benn at No. 129 and a few days later, Tim Bernhardt got a call from a colleague, wondering why.
“It wasn’t meant in any negative way,” said Bernhardt, who was the Stars’ director of amateur scouting at the time. “He just wondered if we’d tested him because their team had, and the results weren’t anything special. Once we drafted him, he started to get some attention … and he developed very quickly. By the summer camp, right after the draft, we couldn’t believe the progress. It was like, ‘Wow, this guy is going to be a player.’”
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Bernhardt was using Benn to illustrate a point about the art and evolution of NHL scouting and how difficult it is to predict how a player, at 17, only a year removed from playing in the Vancouver Island Junior Hockey League, could develop into a player with 1,112 NHL games and 907 points on his resume when he was mostly an afterthought in his draft year.
In fact, that draft year, the Stars had back-to-back picks in the fifth round. At 128, they chose Austin Smith from Gunnery Prep in Connecticut who never played an NHL game. Like Smith, Benn was an off-the-radar long shot. One panned out. The other didn’t.
What makes hockey scouting so difficult? Primarily, it’s the age at which players are selected.
Macklin Celebrini, the consensus No. 1 pick in this week’s draft, celebrated his 18th birthday on June 13. It meant he played this past season, his freshman year at Boston University, as a 17-year-old and was a star. Celebrini produced an impressive 64 points in 38 games and won the Hobey Baker as the NCAA’s top male player.
As talented as Celebrini is, it will take years before he reaches his full professional potential. Two of the top four players from the 2014 draft — Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett, key players on the Florida Panthers’ run to the Stanley Cup Final — both are coming off their best NHL seasons, a decade after they went No. 2 to Buffalo and No. 4 to Calgary.
In a body contact sport, the transition from major junior, college or even the European leagues to the NHL is an enormous step up and one that takes time. For players, even those with tantalizing skill sets, it doesn’t happen overnight.
“The No. 1 thing about scouting is projection because what you see is not necessarily what it’s going to be in five years,” said Bernhardt, who scouted 28 years in all. “I’ve always said my mom can go to the game with me and tell me who the three best players on the ice are. It’s not necessarily about who plays well in a specific game. It’s ‘How much better are they going to get over time?’ And then, ‘Do those skills translate into an NHL player?’ We used to have a scouting category — improvement potential. How much better can they get? That’s the key. Some guys can and do get better. Other guys can’t.”
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To Vaughn Karpan, the Vegas Golden Knights assistant general manager who spent more than three decades in the scouting game, scouting had to change over time because everything else — the rules, the expanding size of the hockey-playing world, even the players themselves — changed as well.
Procedurally, the NHL Draft was amended in 1979 when it evolved from an “amateur” to an “entry” draft to accommodate players who had left junior hockey to play professionally in the World Hockey Association. It also lowered the age of eligibility by two years, which meant ever-younger players were now coming under the scrutiny of NHL teams.
As technology evolved, video became more prominent. As the game grew significantly in the United States, leagues expanded. In the early days, scouts filed paper reports, sometimes mailing them in. Eventually, everything became computerized. Suddenly, typing became a necessary skill.
“Today’s hockey player is different than 20 years ago; today’s athletes are different,” Karpan said. “Nowadays, these kids we’re drafting are all professional athletes. They may not be getting paid, but they’re professional athletes. They train all the time and they’re closer to the end of what they can be than guys from previous generations. The challenge that scouts today face is figuring out the players that have runway left.”
A half-century ago, NHL teams slowly began to recruit players from Europe but focused primarily on traditional hockey-playing nations: Russia, Sweden, Finland and Czechia. Now, it’s a global talent search. According to the NHL, players from 18 different nationalities played in the league this year. The NHL has played regular-season and/or exhibition games in China, Japan, all over Europe, and this past preseason in Australia, which has sent two players (Nathan Walker and Jordan Spence) to the NHL.
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As a result of that worldwide growth, the first glimpse of a prospect is sometimes through video, which has evolved greatly over time, according to Tom Thompson, who began his scouting career as a part-timer in the Calgary Flames organization and eventually became the Minnesota Wild director of scouting.
“Now you can get high-quality videos, almost instantly,” Thompson said. “Whereas in the old days, the videos weren’t nearly as detailed or sophisticated. All they did was focus on the guy. Others were so grainy you couldn’t make out much. It means now, you can get a way better feel for people, just because of the quality of the videos.”
But Bernhardt believes that while video scouting has merit, there is also a good reason why most scouts feel they need to be in the rink to make a proper assessment.
“On video, you can’t really see what the players see because you can’t see the whole ice,” Bernhardt said. “There might have been a guy wide open on the far side that he should have seen and didn’t. Is he taking too long shifts? Is he going hard to the bench? How’s he interacting with his coach, with his teammates? You don’t see those things on video. To me, video can be a supplement, but if you’re relying on it as a really important tool, you’re in trouble.”
Nowadays, the NHL brings the top draft-eligible players weeks before the draft to a scouting combine in Buffalo, where the players are evaluated in a number of physical tests. Teams also use the combine as a chance to do interviews so they can get to know them a little off the ice. Most tend to be prepped for the combine by their agents, so answers can sound a little rehearsed.
Bernhardt is of two minds about the combine — that it can help in some ways and mislead in others. On the one hand, it can give teams a baseline of where a player is in terms of his physical development. But playing hockey at a high level requires the body and the mind to work together in a complex fashion. Sometimes, the results of testing can lead teams to draw wrong conclusions.
Wayne Gretzky famously finished last in one of his first strength tests as a pro. Gary Roberts, who ultimately became one of the most prominent fitness gurus in the game and now advises the Seattle Kraken, couldn’t do two chin-ups at his first camp. Bernhardt remembers Connor McDavid having just a middle-of-the-road score in a long-jump-style test, which was supposed to illustrate a player’s skating ability. McDavid, of course, is the premier skater in the game today.
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Bernhardt thinks there’s a lesson there.
“David Conte (a former New Jersey Devils scout) had a great line,” Bernhardt said. “He used to say, ‘Go into a Grade 11 class and say that kid’s going to be a really good doctor or that kid’s going to be a really good lawyer.’ Even if you had 20 kids in Grade 11 who might say they want to be a doctor, not all of them are going to make it. Good luck trying to figure that out when they’re 16.”
According to Karpan, the problem with scouting today is everybody thinks they can scout.
“Generally, they mean they can tell you what happened. But that’s not scouting. Scouting is trying to figure out why it happened, good or bad. Scouting is watching and charting progression,” he said.
In his time as a scout, Thompson said he was careful about the terms he used to evaluate players because some words carry a heavy and sometimes misleading negative connotation.
“One word I tried my best to eliminate from all the discussions was ‘character,’” Thompson said. “I just think there’s a moral tone to the term. That’s not what we’re trying to figure out. What we’re trying to assess is someone’s personality. Sometimes, a player can be successful in business and in life but doesn’t make it to the NHL maybe because his competitive juices weren’t what they needed to be.”
Scouting is a largely anonymous profession, which requires its fraternity to put in many miles on the road, away from family, beating the bushes for talent in out-of-the-way arenas around the world. Many scouts gravitate to the profession as a means of staying in the game once their playing careers end.
Bernhardt only waited six months after his retirement before joining the NHL’s Central Scouting bureau. He chose scouting rather than coaching partly because there’s greater stability to the profession and it didn’t require him to relocate every three or four years, the way coaches usually do.
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In his time with Calgary, Thompson became close with Doug Risebrough during his playing career. When Risebrough became GM of the Wild, he hired Thompson to run his scouting department.
“I was the youngest guy in my law class, had a chance to do major litigation early, so didn’t think I’d be missing out on anything in my legal career and the hockey was fun,” Thompson said. “I also liked the travel. It made me wiser. It broadened my horizons.”
Karpan said he ventured down the scouting path because he liked the independence of the profession.
“The interesting thing about scouting is there’s no answer key,” Karpan said. “The answer presents itself over the next five to seven years. I’ve always liked that. The longer I did it, the more I enjoyed it because I realized how much I didn’t know at the onset, and how many tools you acquire over the years.”
As challenging as drafting can be, the 2024 draft figures to be even more confounding than usual because there is little consensus beyond Celebrini.
Even though he’s now retired, Bernhardt went to the Memorial Cup in Saginaw last month to watch a handful of the more prominent draft-eligible players compete. Because this is a draft with a clear No. 1 and then a lot of uncertainty, there could be more off-the-board types of picks, even early on. It’s especially true because up to half a dozen players from Russia are projected as first-rounders, but some didn’t even play in the KHL.
“That’s why the Russian players could slide this year,” Bernhardt said. “A lot of them, teams didn’t see them play live. They’re going to be leery, wondering, ‘Do we take the guy we really know or the guy we watched on video?’ That’ll be a factor in the draft.”
According to Bernhardt, scouts need to be both patient and phlegmatic to survive because whatever happens, you’re not going to get a final answer for years to come.
“That’s the thing about scouting,” he said. “Only time will tell you if you were right or not.”
(Top photo: John Russell / NHLI via Getty Images)
