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| The Columbus Dispatch
There will be no bustling draft floor with hockey executives kibitzing about potential deals.
There will be no conversations between general managers taking place in hotel lobbies or conference rooms, no prying eyes or ears of reporters, no big stage, no spotlight, no oversized draft board and certainly no booing when commissioner Gary Bettman begins the 2020 NHL draft on Tuesday.
Not unless he wants to include a soundtrack of it, that is, to lighten the mood for the first “virtual” draft in league history — which will be conducted online over two days.
“I think the only difference, really, is now you’re not face-to-face (with other GMs) and you like to see your colleagues and say hello and shake hands — and now it’s just all on the phone,” said Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen, who is heading into his eighth draft with Columbus. “That’s the biggest difference, but I think everybody misses going into the draft. That’s the big day for the scouts, and the NHL always does such a good job with the drafts, wherever they are.”
It’s just not feasible to have that kind of draft, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues and sports leagues make adaptations to it, including drafts held “virtually” via the internet and phone conversations originating in 31 different war rooms.
One of those war rooms is already set up at Nationwide Arena, where Kekalainen will oversee the Jackets’ draft along with director of amateur scouting Ville Siren and Tom Bark, the team’s scouting coordinator.
“It will be interesting to see how it plays out,” Kekalainen said. “We’ll have all of our scouts on Zoom, so they can hear us and see us in the conference room, and we’ll have the NHL feed there and the draft board and all that stuff, so it will be interesting to see. I saw the setup (Thursday). It looks great and I’m looking forward to a whole new experience, which there’s been many this year, like the first-ever virtual (organizational) scouting meetings and so forth. … There’s been a lot of Zoom lately.”
That included the video conference Friday during which he relayed those thoughts with reporters, which followed a Zoom interview in August to wrap up the 2019-20 season and Zoom interviews held before and after each of the Jackets’ postseason games inside the NHL’s Toronto bubble.
Zoom interviews also took the place of face-to-face chats with draft prospects, which are usually held in May at the annual scouting combine. And scouts this year were forced to lean heavily on video breakdowns to make their final assessments.
That’s a lot of dependence on technology, if you’re keeping track, and there will now be an entire NHL draft that depends on it working free of glitches. It worked to near perfection for the NFL, which held its draft in April the same way, but there’s no guarantee there won’t be issues that crop up now.
Does that give an NHL GM something extra to worry about?
“A lot smarter people than me take care of it, so I can’t worry about it,” Kekalainen said, smiling.
We’ll take that as a “yes.”
Ultimately, though, this draft will be about the same things as every one that’s preceded it. It will usher in a crop of new stars, new “grinders” and, potentially, send current players moving to different teams via trades — all dependent upon offseason plans that developed over a much longer span than usual and included a number of adjustments to what’s normally done.
Scouting, for instance, required a lot more work breaking down video, and none of it included footage from 2019-20 playoff games. Postseason tournaments in every hockey league other than the NHL were canceled, not just postponed, around the globe last spring, so scouts never got the chance to watch prospects one last time in person in pressure-packed situations.
So they worked with what they had, including lots of video, notes off games they had attended and many phone calls. It’s been a lot of work, but also educational.
“It has been challenging, because we missed (seeing) the playoffs,” Siren said. “But at the same time, we had the chance to see the players this season, the new season already, and it has been very good. Some guys had gotten better during the summer and some guys hadn’t.”
Soon, many of those guys will be drafted, waiting for a phone call and watching on television.
bhedger@dispatch.com
@BrianHedger
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