The job of a scout, therefore, is more than just finding the outside skills -- grading a player on his skating, passing and shooting. It's looking inside of a player to find out just how much more he can provide.

Scouting is designed to be the lifeblood of every pro sports franchise. No one buys a Stanley Cup on the free-agent market. The common thread of championship teams is derived from drafting and developing players and watching those youngsters bring life and hunger to their NHL clubs.

Look at all of those great players the Montreal Canadiens drafted to help them win four Stanley Cups in the 1960s and six more in the '70s that Caron had a hand in selecting. And how about the job Bill Torrey did with the New York Islanders and Glen Sather with the Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s?

But that was when the Draft was limited to 20-year-olds/or just a little younger. Now, players are 17 and still learning, still growing mentally and physically. I remember former Toronto Maple Leafs GM Cliff Fletcher once telling me: ''We are picking these kids so young that you might have a better shot at getting an impact player by putting names on a board and tossing darts at it.''

And this is the guy who picked Gary Roberts in Calgary and watched him become a 50-goal scorer and a cornerstone leader for the Flames, Carolina Hurricanes and now with the Maple Leafs.

Former Toronto Maple Leafs GM Cliff Fletcher once compared drafting future NHLers to "putting names on a board and tossing darts at it,'' even though he was responsible for selecting players such as Gary Roberts.

New Jersey Devils scouting guru David Conte wasn't part of his team's selection of Muller, second overall to Lemieux that year. But a couple years ago, he recalled that draft and the difference scouts have to face today.

These talent-seekers-extraordinaire have to look beyond what they see from a player on the ice at 17 and project him to what he will be like at 22 and 25 ... and 30. They have to often look beyond skating, shooting and stickhandling.

Jack Paterson, an old Detroit scout who befriended this young writer, once told me: ''Before the age of video and so many scouting advances, I remember thinking that if you had a row of scouts watching a game and you set about to trick them with distorted information, you could. In fact, I remember doing it with Marcel Dionne -- saying that I thought he was too small to handle the physical nature of the NHL. I walked from one end of the row to the other after making that comment -- and lo and behold, the guy next to me observed. 'You know something, Dionne's size worries me.' ''

Remember all of the jealously from certain NHL teams when Wayne Gretzky came over from the World Hockey Association? ''There were plenty of teams that said I was too small and too slow and that I never went back on defense,'' Gretzky, currently a co-owner of the Phoenix Coyotes, remembered at this year's draft. ''The intangibles often make the difference in what a player is really going to be in the NHL.''

Most of Colorado's success over the years has come from strong drafting. Dating back to the Quebec years, the Avs have chosen players like Joe Sakic, Alex Tanguay and Milan Hejduk.

We still talk about the gems uncovered late in the draft like Brett Hull (117 in 1984), Luc Robitaille (171 in '84) and Dominik Hasek (207 in 1983), but the truth of the matter is that the two teams we talk about most regarding the draft -- New Jersey and Colorado -- have company.

It's easy to correlate the recent successes that New Jersey (Stanley Cups in 1995, 2000 and 2003) and Colorado (Stanley Cups in 1996 and 2001) have had primarily because of great drafting.

Just look at the litany of Colorado picks like Joe Sakic, Owen Nolan, Mats Sundin, Eric Lindros along with Chris Drury, Milan Hejduk and Alex Tanguay along with New Jersey's inbred group of picks like Brendan Shanahan, Bill Guerin, Martin Brodeur, Scott Niedermayer, Petr Sykora, Patrik Elias, etc.

But former New York Rangers GM Neil Smith also offers the Red Wings (Cups in 1997, 1998 and 2002) as proof of what successful drafting can produce. And he's right.

''Everybody points to the Red Wings' $60 million payroll, but would they be where they are today without the production of Pavel Datsyuk and Jiri Fischer and Henrik Zetterberg?'' Smith said late last season.