Vegas exec stays busy as second draft approaches

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Scott Luce shouldn’t be as swamped as he was last year, yet he is taking no time to relax.

Although the Vegas Golden Knights don’t currently have a firstround selection or the stockpile of picks they did last summer, they’re preparing for the upcoming NHL draft as if they did.

“Last year, everything was so new — everything we did was a first,” said Luce, the director of amateur scouting for a Golden Knights team that lost in the Stanley Cup Final to the Washington Capitals on Thursday night.

“We were all learning from each other, taking the best practices from different organizations we came from to create our own model. Then you see the success the guys had on the ice and it puts things in a whole new context.”

Luce and the rest of the Vegas front office were the busiest folks in hockey last June.

Not only was their first NHL draft coming up, but the Knights had no NHL players to speak of.

Vegas wouldn’t officially name its first NHL players until June 21 — a few days before the entry draft kicked off in Chicago — when it took 30 players in the expansion draft and ended up with a few more who turned into key players due to various trades.

“It was the first expansion draft in a salary cap era,” general manager George McPhee said before Game 1 of the final, “and that created possibilities that we may not have anticipated early on. …

“In addition to the rules being more favorable, there were teams that were looking to get out of certain deals, and we could get better players or better draft picks if we could play ball with them.”

McPhee’s wheeling and dealing at the expansion draft gave the Knights two additional first-round picks NHL draft First round: Rounds 2-7:

No. 1 pick: Blue Jackets picks: and five selections in the first two rounds.

With the Knights on their way to becoming the most successful expansion team in modern North American pro sports history, McPhee and Vegas were surprisingly in the role of buyer at the trade deadline.

This year’s first-round pick went to Detroit for Tomas Tatar — the price of doing business when you’re in the hunt. Vegas now doesn’t get its first pick until late in the second round and has a total of seven selections.

“You have to have consistency because you always draft in a different spot and every draft is different,” Luce said from the NHL scouting combine in Buffalo last Saturday as the Knights were prepping for Game 3 of the final in Washington. “The process stays the same.”

Luce, 49, knows a little something about stockpiling a franchise with top-end talent. After 13 years drafting for the Florida Panthers, Luce was on the short end of a front-office shakeup in 2016. He wasn’t out of work very long.

“There was a change of philosophy in Florida,” Luce said. “They were trying to raise the bar, and every organization should do that. They made some changes and some of us landed in Vegas.”

McPhee hired Luce and Erin Ginnell — Luce’s director of amateur scouting in Florida and a former Blue Jackets scout during their expansion years who was also fired by the Panthers — not long after the 2016 draft.

“This is the sprint to the end for the scouting fraternity,” Luce said. “In the scouting world, our Stanley Cup is the draft.”