With the countdown to the 2025 NHL Draft in single digits, Utah Mammoth General Manager Bill Armstrong met with the media to preview the upcoming event. From discussing the fourth-overall pick to his overall drafting strategy, Armstrong gave insight into the process. Below are the biggest takeaways from the media availability.
On the Last Month and the Process Ahead of the Draft:
“It’s a process, you have to follow the process … It’s really getting the best list from your area scouts and your head scouts and exploring who you’re going to get at the range you’re at. When you do that, you get into that range, you exhaust the process, I call it, of going through every single player, meeting them at the combine, going through their testing, going through their video, reading all the research that your staff has done on them. Then sometimes, taking them to dinner, sometimes going to meet their families, going to their houses or going to dinner with their families. We love to get to know them as much as we can.”
On the Talent Available and Being Honest About Each Eligible Prospect:
“I think there’s a good talent range at that area where we’re picking. Now it’s just working out the order and finalizing that with the scouts. The one thing that we do is we look at the player, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We go through everything. We don’t hide anything. We’re in those conversations about the player. We never want to draft the player then (they) show up at camp, ‘well nobody said his skating wasn’t that good’ or ‘hey, he had trouble putting on weight.’ We go through it all, so it’s a really good thing. I think we have an experienced scouting staff. I was always in the kind of thought processes (where) you never hide anything; you bring everything to the light. So, we’re in that process exploring what’s going to come to us at four and I like what’s there. It’s a great opportunity for the club to move ahead.”
On Potentially Trading the Fourth-Overall Pick:
“At this (point in the) process every GM, especially the guys there in the top-ten, are all jockeying around and saying can they move up? Can they move down? What’s the best option for their club? We talk with GMs daily about that and everybody’s got a price. It’s very rare that it’s done that you could move from four to two or two to one. It’s very rare that happens because everybody values the player that they have at that pick, and it’s very rare that it does change hands. But do you have to explore it? Yes, that’s part of my job. Every morning I wake up and I go to work and see if we can better the pick or if we come up with different options to maximize where we are.”
On Drafting Strategy:
“We take the best overall player. I know a lot of guys, they’re like ‘oh we’ve got to go to the podium and draft the same guy that we drafted the year before,’ and I’m like if that's the best player you should take him because you have the ability in the NHL to trade players. If you’ve got Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby, I’m sure you can trade one of them for some pretty good players. So that's been the theory and the thought process we've always had is, draft the best player available.”
On Personality of the Player Factoring into the Decision to Draft:
“When we draft players, we do a lot of work on them. We go back, sometimes talk to their peewee coaches and their teachers and get to know them inside and out. If you have a player, sometimes (he) ends up being your captain, it’s not an accident that that happens. You can see at an early age the leadership and the qualities that these particular young men have even when they’re 15, 16, 17. You can really learn a lot about them and kind of predict the future by getting in there and really diving deep, and doing personality tests too, helps you out a lot and the psych doctors and their coaches really can kind of guide you. But most times when you’re successful and you’re drafting someone that overachieves or becomes your captain, or leads you to a championship, it has to do with their personality, so you have to do a lot of work in that.”
On Confidence with Making Draft Decisions:
“The confidence, I always say, comes from a source. Our source is the fact that we’ve been able to draft the Cooleys, and the Doans, and the Guenthers of the world and they’ve been great pieces for us. Now you’re going to see the Buts and Simashevs coming in. So, confidence comes from our scouting staff and the work that they’ve done in the past and you can see what a difference that’s made in our organization.
“Even the fact that last year we had to trade (Conor) Geekie and (J.J.) Moser, those guys were all drafts from our staff. You can see it in an early time with this organization that the quality scouting that Ryan (Jankowski) and Darryl (Plandowski) and their staff has provided. If you go to Hockey DB and you look at the Guenther draft, there’s four or five kids that are already playing in the National Hockey League out of that draft, and that’s not by accident. That’s by the work that they do and how they run their staff. It’s important that we continue that path. We’re not getting out of this unless we draft well, and we’ve got to take those next steps.”
