panoo

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Perhaps you've seen footage of the top prospects being paraded into the hotel ballroom for the annual fitness testing portion of the NHL Scouting Combine. They arrive in pre-arranged groups of eight or nine; wide-eyed teenagers wearing shorts and tight-fitting sleeveless tops designed to give the strength and conditioning coaches from the NHL teams revealing evidence of the players' body compositions.

From the moment they enter the room with their completed medical health questionnaires in hand, these players will be poked, prodded, photographed and pushed to the limits of their physical capabilities.

The backdrop for the battery of fitness tests is a room full of event staff, media, NHL general managers, scouts and coaches, obviously with the latter groups present to make one final assessment on this year's crop before selecting these future investments on draft day. In fact, if an auctioneer was added, we could likely forgo the draft all together and start the bidding process right there beside the stationary bikes.

Despite this well publicized aspect of the Draft Combine, countless conversations with the NHL clubs have revealed that this portion of the event is not necessarily the most important aspect for the draft day decision makers.

That is not to suggest that the fitness tests are not analyzed extensively by most of the clubs, nor that many teams use the more strenuous tests to gauge a player's ability to push himself and compete when the body is no longer willing. In fact, NHL clubs certainly do make evaluations in this regard.

But the most valued aspect of the combine in the minds of the majority of the team personnel happens away from the media glare of the ball room; when the players are no longer in their testing groups.

It's a process that cannot be quantified with spreadsheets, performance charts and statistical comparisons between the players. This most revealing aspect of the Combine happens behind closed doors in team meeting rooms throughout the hotel during the face-to-face interview sessions with the players.

Beginning several days prior to the Friday/Saturday fitness testing portion, NHL clubs begin these interviews with the players in 20-minute sessions. Each prospect's interview schedule is the result of the requests from NHL teams to Central Scouting in the weeks leading up to the event.

Each year immediately following the annual CS Final Ranking meetings, the NHL clubs are provided with a registration package in which they are asked to complete and return the confidential form to the CS department's NHL office headquarters. A key part of this registration package involves several pages where clubs identify the players that they would like to interview during the event.

Based on an average year, with approximately 100 hundred prospects to choose from, the average NHL club requests to interview almost half of those young men; resulting in 40 to 50 interviews that each team will conduct during the combine.

FULL STORY