Sons try to follow dad at draft
PHILADELPHIA — In 1989, Donald Audette had to wait until the ninth round to be selected by the Buffalo Sabres at the National Hockey League draft.
But he said it was far more difficult Saturday when he waited through five rounds before the Canadiens selected his son, Daniel.
“Fathers are always concerned about their sons,” Audette said. “You want the best for them, you don’t want to see them get hurt.”
Donald Audette is an amateur scout for the Canadiens, but Trevor Timmins, the team’s director of amateur scouting, said there was no element of nepotism in the selection.
“Whenever we discussed Daniel in our meetings, we asked Donald to leave the room,” Timmins said. “And when the draft started, he wasn’t at the table, he was up in the stands with his son. We felt they should be together.”
At 5-foot-8, the younger Audette doesn’t fit into the Canadiens’ strategy of getting bigger, but Timmins said he was surprised Daniel was still available at No. 147 after racking up 76 points with a young Sherbrooke Phoenix team in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
“I said before the draft that we weren’t going to ignore a skilled player just because he’s small and Daniel falls into that category,” Timmins said. Chip off the old block: Claude Lemieux said his son Brendan has earned his reputation as an agitator.
“He plays the same kind of game I did,” Lemieux said after the Buffalo Sabres took Brendan with the first pick in the second round of the draft Saturday morning. “I just hope that he isn’t hated as much as I was. I was pretty hated.”
The younger Lemieux, who had 53 points and 145 penalty minutes for the Ontario Hockey League’s Barrie Colts, was projected as a second-rounder by most of the scouts, but his dad said he was disappointed when Brendan wasn’t selected in the first round Friday night.
“I was pissed off, but it all turned out,” said Lemieux, who was part of four Stanley Cup winners in Montreal and New Jersey.