Teams prep for unusual draft

Vancouver Canucks general manager Jim Benning and his NHL counterparts usually have the luxury of a picture that’s mostly come into focus.

A normal draft year will see scouts and executives spend the spring criss-crossing Europe and North America collecting every scrap of information possible on hockey’s next crop of high-end talent.

They watch games, talk to those closest to the prospects, conduct in-person interviews with players and examine physical testing results. The under-18 world championships, Canadian Hockey League playoffs and Memorial Cup are all on the list of must-attend events.

The circumstances surrounding a 2020 NHL draft and the COVID-19 pandemic, however, aren’t anything resembling normal.

The culmination of junior seasons were cancelled, tournaments were nixed and the league’s annual combine was postponed and looks unlikely to go ahead.

There’s talk the NHL could hold its draft online in the first part of next month even though the 2019-20 season has yet to be completed. But that’s far from the only unique aspect for teams poised to make franchise-altering decisions in this unprecedented era of social distancing.

In short, the book on many of the youngsters in question won’t be fully written.

“It’s nice to see how players perform in the playoffs,” Benning said. “That’s a big part, I think, of finding players that are winners ... when it gets hard in the playoffs, if they step up. We’re going to miss out on all that.

“We’re trying to do the best we can under the circumstances to get to know the players and try to figure out what they’re going to be in three or four years time.”

Scouts logged plenty of kilometres until the novel coronavirus outbreak brought hockey to a halt in mid-March, but there was still lots of work to do, especially outside the top half of an opening round headlined by Alexis Lafreniere and Quinton Byfield.

“Probably not as complete as it would be had it been a normal ending to the season,” ColumbusGM Jarmo Kekalainen said of his team’s eventual list for the draft. “You’re running around trying to (watch) the top guys one last time or guys that you had missed earlier in the year. Now we’re watching tape instead.”