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Scouting America Gary Eggleston, a scout for the NHL's Central Scouting Service, had only a few minutes to talk about the difficulty of evaluating American high-school-age hockey talent. Eggleston, who is based in Massachusetts, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the topic but very little time for small talk. "Sorry, but I've got to catch a plane to Des Moines," he said in mid-September. "The United States Hockey League has a tournament, the Buc Bowl, this week. We'll see 11 teams a couple of times each, then the Eastern Junior League has a tournament in Marlborough, Mass., the next weekend with about 40 teams. Then we'll see a couple of games in that league before the colleges start up and I have to go to Canada in November to look at some of the players we're evaluating in the Ontario Hockey League. Now that there is a Quebec Major Junior Hockey League team in Lewiston, Maine, I can go to Orono and catch a couple of college games at the University of Maine and stop in Lewiston on my way back. The Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference hockey starts a little later than Hockey East, so I have to catch their games a little later. Brown University always schedules a few games against the Canadian colleges so I have to get to those games and, of course, we're watching all the high-school games and then the prep schools have their big tournaments around Christmas. In January, we have the Central Scouting Service meetings when we'll rank the players." Whoa, stop for breath, Gary. Eggleston is one of hundreds of full-time and part-time scouts working for the NHL, its member teams, American and Canadian colleges and junior-hockey leagues, prep and parochial schools. Almost 8,000 American high-school-age hockey players will be evaluated with upwards of 1,000 getting at least a second look, said Jack Barzee, a CSS scout based in Minnesota.
"I break my players into groups and start sorting with the top guys," Barzee said. "It's more of a feel than a science. So many kids fall in the middle that it's difficult to eliminate some kids." The scouts Cross-checking has two meanings in hockey when it comes to scouting. Every drafted player is seen by as many eyes as a club can afford to dedicate to the process. Then the club's list is checked against the Central Scouting Service rankings. The lists don't always agree and teams try to determine whether they've over- or under-rated a player. "We are paid by our organizations to be right," Chicago Blackhawks scout Ron Anderson said. "We don't always agree with Central Scouting. They provide information on so many players. Our organization may not be interested in some of those players so we go deeper with the ones that do interest us. We don't try to beat their system, we use their system. It's a great tool. Everyone is interested in the top guys, but we go further on the guys we identify as possible draft choices for the Blackhawks." "The Red Wings have regionalized our scouting," said Detroit Assistant General Manager Jim Nill. "Mark Leach, who played for St. Lawrence and whose brother, Steve, played in the NHL, is based in New England. His responsibility is to go through all the American high school and junior players and identify players we might be interested in. When he finds players, we have other scouts look them over. They have some good centralized tournaments where he can see a lot of kids early on and that helps eliminate a lot of players. If you have three scouts in three different territories, they wouldn't see all the players. One guy can make the comparison between the player in Minnesota and the one in Massachusetts. So, it's Mark's job to rate them. It's a tough job with a lot of projection and limited sighting. "Mark makes a list, then myself and others look it over," Nill continued. "Our list is changing after every game and it becomes a year-long rotation of players on that list. We see players in the Canadian juniors, American juniors, high schools and then the U.S. Under-18 program. We have to slot people in different areas. We have a computer program and we have reports in there on players in this year's Draft and the kids for next year. It gives us a chance to see whether the 16-year-old got better. We want the kids who get better every year so we're always evaluating every age group. We have kids as young as 14, that's the minimum. There's not many 14-year-olds but we have reports on a lot of 15-year-olds." Eggleston said the crush of scouts last season wanting to observe first-round pick Brian Boyle and his three about-to-be-drafted St. Sebastian's teammates -- goalie Kevin Regan, defenseman Sean Sullivan and center Ken Roche -- got to the point where the scouts were jostling with players' parents to watch the games through the big picture window where the rink is attached to the arts center.
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