11 hours ago
How does life change after your name is called at NHL Draft: A breakdown
The National Hockey League entry draft always is an educated gamble for franchises looking to expand their prospect pools, as well as an important career checkpoint for players who intend to go pro.
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It also has been seen as the league's well-attended annual conference, but this draft, to be held Friday and Saturday at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles, will be different.
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Instead of teams sending the usual complement of about 20 scouts, coaches and support staff, some organizations will be represented by as few as two people; one each from their communications and player development departments.
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The remainder of each staff will monitor and participate in the draft from their own markets, following in the footsteps of the National Football League, National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball.
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The NHL was forced into this decentralized format by the COVID-19 pandemic. Fresh off that experience, team executives voted 26-6 to return to a decentralized event in 2025, citing cost savings and augmented privacy surrounding their hockey operations.
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However, the excitement generated by the glitzy 2024 centralized event, held in the Sphere in Las Vegas, apparently has given some executives second thoughts and the 2025 draft may be an outlier, rather than a trendsetter.
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'Prospects will be seated in the Peacock Theatre similar to the way they were situated last year in the Sphere,' NHL senior manager of event communications Dave Keon Jr. said in an email. 'Once they are selected, they will walk to the stage and meet the commissioner as in the past.
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'After that, they will meet the team that selected them virtually as well as do rights-holder interviews backstage. Once the prospect is finished with the rights-holders, he will head to the media avail with media on site. The PR staff from the team may also make the prospect available to media not in attendance via Zoom.'
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Back in the day, public relations director Bill Tuele was the first point of contact for Edmonton Oilers draft picks.
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'We had 10 or 12 jerseys under the table and a box full of name bars with sticky backs, most of whom would never be drafted, at least not by us, but you had to have them in case strange things happened,' Tuele said. '(Chief scout Barry Fraser or GM Glen Sather) would tell me who was going to be drafted and I would ask him the obvious question: 'is he here?' Barry would say 'yeah he's here,' and there would be this surreptitious pointing to where he was so I could pre-identify where I had to go to get him.
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'Once (commissioner Gary Bettman) or whomever announced the pick, the kid would go through the normal family stuff and walk down to the floor. I would introduce myself, say congratulations, take his jacket, and we would walk toward the podium on the stage, at which point I would give either Barry or Slats the sweater. The player puts on the sweater and hat, poses for the NHL (photographer) and our guy, and then the photogs would have to scurry, because instead of walking off to do a brief interview with (TSN's) James Duthie or whoever, they didn't have that in my day.
