Conference Call: Trevor Timmins

MONTREAL - Canadiens assistant general manager Trevor Timmins took some time on Thursday to chat with reporters on what was previously scheduled to be the morning of the NHL Draft Lottery.

Timmins held court for over 45 minutes, discussing everything from how his staff has been working remotely to finalize the organization's Draft board, to how he thinks COVID-19 will impact young hockey players in their on-ice development down the road.

Here are a few excerpts from his Q&A session.

Question from Doug Gelevan, CBC Montreal

I was wondering how things have changed for you as far as getting ready for the Draft? How's it going to work without being able to see prospects in person this year?

Sure, that's a good question. I think everyone has the same sort of questions. You want to know what we're up to and how we're proceeding. Of course COVID-19 has affected our Draft preparation, just like it's affected every other aspect of not only business, but life in general. But I'm not here to talk about COVID-19 or the Coronavirus. I want to get you guys up to speed on how our amateur scouting department is proceeding and preparing for the 2020 NHL Draft under these life-altering circumstances. When that Draft will be, nobody knows. There's no use even in guessing because it all depends on what transpires here over the next few months. But I want all our fans to know, as well as you people [in the media] that the Montreal Canadiens scouting staff has a structured process that we apply at every Draft, and this hasn't changed for us. I have our staff adhering to the process, which works towards developing our organizational Draft board. With no Draft date in sight, obviously there's no end point for us to work towards. I've kept our amateur scouting staff very busy - somewhat like a university professor - with assignments which have due dates. The assignments come in an orderly fashion, working towards developing our area lists and ultimately towards developing our organizational Draft board. My target date [for that] is approximately mid-May, the same as what we usually would work towards.

You guys are probably wondering what kinds of assignments these would be without being able to see live games. Luckily, we have an online video database that all our scouts have access to. We have a game library that has almost every game a Draft prospect or player anywhere throughout the world has played. These games are already broken down into shifts, goals, assists, breakout passes, etc. along with some analytics. So there's a lot of information available to our scouts online. One of the assignments was to watch all the players in game situations - five-to-10 games - and then file written reports in our Rinknet system. That's time consuming. It takes up a lot of time. I know, myself, I've been busier on the computer and, in the end, watching more games than when I'm out there travelling around the world watching live games.

We're able to do that because we have the bulk of our live coverage done. If you went blind and had never seen a player live and expected to get a good projection, that would be very difficult to do if you just went [based] on video. But our entire staff has a big library of live coverage, which enables us to look at things a little differently through video and maybe look at different things. It's been a big help and we move forward with that.

We also have an online Draft dashboard that our Sports Science department has developed for us. I spoke about that last year. This time that we have now at home, and being able to spend more time on our computers, it allows us to dive more into that and do some more digging and get some information on backgrounds of players and what they're doing on social media, etc.

We can't do in-person interviews or talk to coaches in person, but we can do that sort of stuff on the phone or on FaceTime. We have more time to be able to do these and to be able to dive into this stuff even further as we move along.

And then, of course, because we can't get together, how do you communicate with your staff? Well, communication is key in any organization and we're big on communication throughout the entire season. Now we're not going to be able to get together to have meetings at this point, but we're able to utilize video conferencing like anybody else in the world is. This is something we've done over the last couple of seasons when we go over our organizational main meetings. We get together, Marc Bergevin, our director of amateur scouting Shane Churla, and myself, in our war room in Montreal, and we would do video conferencing with our area scouts, We would review our area lists and talk about their players, along with Dr. Scott, who helps us with our personality evaluation of players.

Question from Martin McGuire, 98.5 FM

Bonjour Trevor, thanks for being available today for us. As you know, there are six local candidates from the [QMJHL] on the list of the Top 31 prospects this year. As you know, part of the story of the Montreal Canadiens includes local players. Do you see that as a good opportunity to get one of them this year?

It's impressive and it's a good year for the Q at the top of the Draft with respect to those players you identified in the Top 31. To make it clear, that's the Top 31 that NHL Central Scouting has identified in North America. That doesn't include international skaters or goalies. But those players that are there certainly have a chance to go in the first round. To be blunt, I hope they don't all go in the first round, because we only have one first round pick at this point. But there are some good NHL prospects in the Q this year and it would be exciting for us and for our fans to be able to secure some of those. We have to wait our turn and make our pick when our turn comes up. Sometimes, you have to cross your fingers and hope that we still have some of those [players] available to us when the opportunity presents itself throughout the Draft.

Question from Jonathan Bernier, Journal de Montréal

As you said, you don't have any idea when the Draft will be held, but do you have something on how the Lottery will be held and what would be the fairest way to do it if we don't end this year?

Yeah, that's a good question. I've got some experience in that, if you go back to the Draft year of Carey Price in 2005 when the Draft was to be held in Ottawa and we ended up having a Lottery for the entire League, but it was weighted based on the previous years' placings. I can't speculate, and it's not my place to speculate, on what will unfold. Obviously the NHL has to wait to see a) if they can finish the regular season, or some of the regular season, and b) if and when they can have the playoffs, and how that would turn out. Those two items would provide the team rankings for the NHL Draft Lottery, so it's tough to speculate what will end up happening. If the Draft were to be held today - and I think the Draft Lottery was supposed to be held tonight - I think we would be picking eighth overall and we would have a chance in the Lottery. We'll have to see what unfolds here moving forward. All we can do as a staff is work towards preparing our Draft board and being ready for whenever we do proceed with the NHL Entry Draft.