Buffalo will host the 2016 NHL Draft on June 24-25, and that along with hosting the combine, has put the city at the heart of all the action for prospects this year. Many team executives would like to see Buffalo continue hosting the combine, but if it doesn't, they would like to see a similar setup elsewhere.
"People far smarter, more important than I figure out how and where they put it; but I like the continuity of having it here," Calgary Flames general manager Brad Treliving said. "Having it in one place, to me, long-term is good. I think there are always benefits of moving it around and different markets and everything like that, but I'd be just as happy to come back and do what we're doing here on a long-term basis. If it does go somewhere and they're changing it, they've got a good model here to follow. If you're going to move it, you want to duplicate what they've done here."
After two years, it's possible the combine may return to Buffalo next year, but that hasn't been agreed upon yet. Whether it returns or not, the city has set the bar for how the event can run.
"The standard is set here," NHL Central Scouting's David Gregory said. "We don't have a permanent home for the combine necessarily, but you're not going to go back (to the old way). We've always tried to make it better in whatever environment we were in. In Toronto, we moved from hotels to conference center, etc., and the opportunity to use a facility like [HarborCenter], you really can't go back. Just the sightlines for this testing, having it in an arena bowl, just creates a lot better opportunity for a lot of the hockey people to see what's going on here. Interviews scheduled in the First Niagara Center allowed much more opportunity. No kids are late; they're not running up and down floors of a hotel. It just turned into a real meeting, a real event for us."