ST. CATHERINES – The BMO CHL/NHL Top Prospects Game is one of the more curious fixtures on the NHL calendar. Ostensibly it’s a chance for the CHL draft-eligible elites to showcase their stuff in front of the largest contingent of NHL scouts gathered outside of the draft combine and the entry draft itself. But even the players know that the idea of a guy playing himself onto the radar with a boffo performance at the Top Prospects is hokum. “It’s not going to make or break you, but there’s a lot of people watching,” Erie Otters centre Dylan Strome said Tuesday.
By definition, the TPG isn’t a place for discoveries—it’s a by-invitation event, NHL teams letting Central Scouting Service know which CHL players they’d like to eyeball in the smallest possible and seemingly least useful sample, 60 minutes of all-star action. So why do it at all, other than provide a bit of all-star entertainment? Why not do it like CHL all-star games in bygone years, when the teams also included already drafted players, a true major-junior best of?
Catch the BMO CHL/NHL Top Prospects Game live at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT on Sportsnet, Sportsnet 590 The Fan and Sportsnet 960 The Fan. Also, watch along on sportsnet.ca with a live stream of the ref cam and highlights as they happen.
Be sure to follow @SNetJunior for live tweets, including scouting takes on all the players.
The key here is timing. NHL scouting departments time their winter meetings around this January event for a few compelling reasons.
1. The area scouts will have books with multiple viewings on top prospects in their respective leagues. Their reports are filed on the fly.
2. Scouting directors will have crossed over at least once and probably twice. As an illustration: Say you have an Ontario- or Michigan-based scouting director who can see most teams in the OHL and sleep in his same bed that night. Said scouting director will have made at least one sweep through the WHL and probably two at this point in a given year. Ditto the Q. He’ll be able to speak with some authority on prospects across the board and have his own preliminary North American list (in advance of the Five Nations under-18s in February and the world under-18s in the spring).
3. Preliminary lists will be roughed out.
4. (And this is a critical slot, down the list only in chronology) By January you have an idea where your draft pick is likeliest to fall. That is, if you are going to land a pick in the 20s, it won’t be so very critical what the order of your top five or top eight will look like; so long as you have the names right, you’ll be OK. Your draft starts around 15 or so—identifying who might be likely to land there and who (and especially why) a player might fall.
5. (And again, strictly chronologically) For scouts from the regions, their first real opportunity to see a draft-eligible player of interest from outside their regions comes at the Top Prospects. For some who don’t extensively do crossover scouting and in the event of injury, this game might be their only chance to see a player who’s slotted in their team’s range come draft day. Which is to say, if you are a scout working the WHL and your NHL team is in the range from No. 3 to 6 on draft day, you might have had a chance to see Lawson Crouse on television at the world juniors but this is your first real chance to see Mitch Marner or Dylan Strome this season.
Yeah, scouts deride media, fans or anyone who expresses an opinion based on “one-game scouting,” given that you have no context, no idea whether it’s a prospect at his best, at his worst or at his usual speed. And one-game scouting would seem especially dubious if that one game is a confection like Top Prospects… but still.
Said one area scout in for his team’s meetings this week: “There’s nobody who can watch all these kids and get a useful opinion on them off one game. I’ll circle four to six names in the range [where the team might pick]. Not kids that I’ve seen before. All you can do is get mental pictures of them… sorta get what someone else [on the scouting staff] says about them. Mostly you can understand the type of player—the profile he fits—based on the game, but unless you’re in his area you don’t get a whole picture until you cross over.”
It’s not make or break, as Strome says, just a chance to make a first impression for players who might not be among the game’s stars.