The road from Lethbridge to Medicine Hat is not terribly long – about two hours and 170 kilometers, or 105 miles for us outliers down here in the USA. It’s part of Alberta Route 3, the Crowsnest Highway, a 721-mile route spanning two provinces that originated as a 19th-century Gold Rush trail.
But between those two Western Hockey League outposts is a whole lot of nothing. Once you pass the town of Bow Island (pop. 2,036), AB-3 does not curve for 30 miles until you reach the hamlet of Seven Persons (pop. 277). It’s just a straight line of pavement that disappears in the distance.
It's a back-and-forth criss-cross of roads like this by Flyers scouts all around the world that helps lead a draft class to Philadelphia every summer. The Flyers have more than a dozen scouts covering all levels of hockey around the world – most of them in North America, but also in Europe as well. But even in today’s age of nearly ubiquitous video and social media highlights, the simple fact of the matter is that to do the job properly, you’ve got to hit the road.
All that work comes to fruition for the organization this week as they take part in the 2025 NHL Draft. With the Flyers holding ten picks in the draft (as of Wednesday), their work is that much more important. The process of identifying which 10 of the probably more than 350 eligible 2007-born players they’d like to make part of the team has been going on for the last year, and really beyond.
How do the Flyers find these players? The foundation is the scouting staff, and the miles put on their cars. For nearly 20 years, Flyers scout Mark Greig has traversed western Canada as one of the Flyers’ primary scouts covering the WHL. Greig offered a bit of a look at the process, which involves long hours spent traveling through usually very cold parts of the planet, a lot of it in the dark.
“A routine week in season is between five and seven games viewed,” Greig said. “So your travel is usually significant. We do try to line up the city as close as we can. At times, you have to jump a little farther than you'd like to get the right viewing of the right player.”
It doesn’t seem like it would be, but the WHL is actually fairly well laid out as far as cities being in proximity to one another. Greig is based out of Lethbridge, so he can get to the Alberta portion of the league, and part of Saskatchewan, in his car. But the other side of the league requires some air travel.
“Anything over five or six hours that doesn't make sense to drive, I’ll fly and connect those cities,” he said. “So maybe a flight to Vancouver, watch a game Friday, drive to Everett to watch a game, Saturday, drive to Seattle and watch a game on Sunday, and then fly home. So you're always connecting the cities that are closest together, and flying into a spot that makes that work.”
Sounds simple, until it snows. And guess what - that happens a lot in the hockey world in the winter.
“I was in Quebec,” Greig said, “and I'd missed a game one night due to a storm. The next day, I drove earlier and still kind of had some hard, hard travel through weather. And it was January, February, months, you know, anywhere in Western Canada, Ontario, Quebec, that you're trying to keep the driving to a minimum, just for potential weather. But you always seem to get stuck somehow driving through something challenging, or at times you just can't make the game.”
Of course, those are the trips that they all tell stories about. The ones that go smoothly are boring.
“Marty Gendron in Quebec, has his challenges across that province,” Greig said. “Todd Hearty, and Shane Fukushima in the US - I mean, he's up in Minnesota, Michigan, those areas can be a challenge. So it's no different for anybody, and it becomes a common topic of conversation among us. Did you get caught in that one out by Brandon, Manitoba? Or did you get caught in that one down by Detroit? And the guys share the stories, and then we all live it.”
Generally, the Flyers’ scouting staff spends the first part of the season in their own territory. As things progress and they build their database on certain players, they start to cross over into other territories so all scouts get an opportunity to see players the organization has highest in their rankings. At the same time, they often start to see players who could end up in the Flyers’ plans in the later rounds.
“I'll spend the first two months in my own league with a colleague who never leaves my league,” Greig said. “At the two months threshold, I've seen every team multiple times, and we've started to develop that list. Now, when I cross over into Ontario or Quebec or the US or Europe, I'm targeting top-three-round guys even more precisely, maybe top-two-round guys. And those are those trips outside of my league are totally targeted and designed for those higher-end kids, so that we have a group of six or seven of us that have seen the top-three round-guys. In those viewings, you'll catch later picks as well, and the crosshairs and you certainly take advantage of that. But when I leave my league and Grant Armstrong, who stays in the West, continues to watch any developments that are taking place, I'm out looking at top-two, three-round guys and building an overall list with Brent [Flahr], Shane [Fukushima], Todd [Hearty], [Martin Gendron], Dennis Patterson and so on.”
Despite all the effort, scouting is sometimes an inexact science. The players on the organizational radar arrive there as 16-year-olds, and are draft-eligible at 18. Outside of perhaps the top few players in each draft year, it’s often difficult to forecast what kind of player a teenager is going to be three or four years down the road.
“You've got where they're playing, the development that they're being coached under the team they're on, weak or poor,” Greig said. “The one thing we can control is outside dynamics that unfold for a young player and through their teenage years. So you can certainly understand why at draft time, why the character check, background check, speaking with as many people as you can that are around that player on a day-to-day basis, coaches, trainers, billets, teachers, to try and really nail it down.”
