One might wonder how anybody would be crazy enough to start up a website dedicated to the NHL draft as I did seven years ago with Recrutes.ca. Well, it all started as a very young fellow, who from as far back as I can recall, was crazy about the annual event.
As a seven-year-old Habs fan who had just witnessed a stunning Cup win by my team in upsetting the Big Bad Bruins and eventually Chicago in Jean Beliveau’s swan song in 1971, I fondly remember a few weeks later seeing all of the news clips showing Beliveau’s heir apparent in plaid pants with bushy blonde sideburns shaking hands with Sam Pollock. I can still picture the grin on Sam’s face, as he, the Stanley Cup-winning general manager, had just stolen the game’s next superstar from the California Golden Seals after months earlier dealing them a fellow by the name of Bill Hicke and a swap of first-round picks.
I may have only been seven but I realized that this draft thing was an integral part of building a hockey team if this wild-haired blond 20-year-old was one day going to be as essential and popular as my recently-retired hero – all because Montreal’s GM had the foresight to maneuver himself into the position to get this star in the making through this wonderful entity called the NHL draft.
This was my introduction to a lifelong fascination with the NHL draft, an affliction that only intensified two years later when, as an Ottawa-Valley boy who was a big Ottawa 67’s fan, I witnessed the “next Bobby Orr” in Denis Potvin, also get chosen first overall in the NHL draft by the New York Islanders.
Islander Powerhouse through the Draft
That horrible team would get good in a hurry with that cornerstone defenceman, and it wasn’t long before that very squad was the chief rival of my beloved Habs and stopping their Stanley Cup run at the end of the 1970s, in no small part because in 1977 the same genius who had stolen Lafleur made an error in judgment in listening to his scouts and passing over a local boy named Mike Bossy in the draft to take Mark Napier from the WHA’s Birmingham Bulls in the WHA.
At the time I had not minded the pick at all, as I had gotten to see a lot of Napier that past season playing for the Toronto Toros in games that were televised on one of the three channels we got with our country cable… the fledgling station called Global out of Toronto, and I thought he was going to be a special NHLer as he’d been a sensation at the age of 18 in a league filled with veteran pro players.
Already an avid subscriber to the Hockey News, I’d seen the great statistics this Bossy kid had put up, scoring 70-plus goals in four consecutive seasons in Laval, but I kept reading that he was soft and paid no attention to the defensive side of the game. Oh, how wrong they were! The following season as Napier had a so-so sophomore season with Birmingham in the WHA, Bossy was notching 53 goals and running away with the Calder Trophy as NHL’s top rookie playing on a line with another burgeoning superstar the Islanders had stolen in the second round of the 1975 draft by the name of Bryan Trottier.
As a huge hockey fan, events like those made me fully aware that the NHL draft was the single most important component in building a hockey team. Lafleur became the key piece on a Habs team that would win four Cups from 1976-80, and over the next four years, Potvin, Trottier, and yes – Mike Bossy – would be the cornerstone of an Islanders team that would also win four consecutive Cups.
Almost a decade after picking Lafleur first overall right after a Cup victory, there was a distinct feeling of deja vu as the Habs, fresh off a Cup win, once again finagled their way into the top pick (Sam Pollock’s parting gift), and were poised to select a player everyone was touting as the game’s next superstar in Doug Wickenheiser in 1980.
As history would show, this time around the Canadiens weren’t so fortunate with that top selection as they proceeded to shatter this great young player’s confidence in his first two seasons by playing him sparingly or sitting him in the stands, and he never developed into the great player all had him destined to become.
Meanwhile, much like in 1977 when the Hab passed over a local Quebecois kid in Bossy, the third overall pick from that draft – Denis Savard – would become a superstar in Chicago, and Habs fans were once again left with the feeling of what could have been. If only the scouts in Montreal had been “wise” enough to predict the future for these two young men.
It only served to strengthen my fascination for the whole drafting process, as I was now well aware that even when you held the first-overall pick, you have no guarantees that he will turn into a star that will help your team win playoff games. It also became clear to me that perhaps the most important part of building a successful hockey team was in hiring good scouts.
It was a major reason why the Islanders became a powerhouse in the late 1970s and early 80s. Washington selected a kid named Greg Joly first overall in 1974 when they could have chosen Clark Gillies, who went fourth overall to the Islanders. The following year, Philadelphia chose Mel Bridgeman first overall when Trottier was available. Two years after that, 14 teams passed on Bossy, and voila! the Islanders…once the joke of the league… now had what would be the top line in hockey for the next eight seasons thanks to oversights by other teams’ scouting staffs. An inexact science, indeed!
Each and every season throughout the 1980s I would closely follow junior prospects in the Hockey News and try to see as many of them as possible attending junior games in Hull and Ottawa. The day after the draft, I would pick up the Ottawa Citizen and wait anxiously for the next issue of the Hockey News to study all of the draft selections for weeks on end, as those were my only sources for finding you found out about who was selected. There was no pomp and circumstance in those days. No radio or television coverage. Sadly, there were no Bob McKenzies to fill us in on draft day.
Journalism Graduate
I studied journalism in the mid-1980s and at every opportunity, I was writing about hockey, including a stint as the sports editor at a weekly paper and as a cub reporter with the Pembroke Daily News covering the Pembroke Lumber Kings.
With the 1990’s came an increased interest in the draft proceedings as sports networks began to appear on our cable TV packages, and hockey fans were realizing that the draft was a vital component in building their favourite hockey team. You weren’t going to build a winner the Harold Ballard way by trading away young players and draft picks for quick fixes.
In the early 90’s I purchased a Mac classic with its glorious 9-inch screen and a $3000 laser printer and started up my own weekly newspaper in the Gatineau Hills called the Gatineau Gottaknow. This allowed me to write about hockey every chance I got. I wrote about the draft whenever June came around, kept sharpening my writing skills, and learned the ins and outs of running a publishing company even if it often was a one-man operation.
By the turn of the Millennium, after almost a decade of publishing small newspapers and magazines in the Ottawa Valley, I concentrated on hockey-based publications, eventually launching a monthly newspaper in eastern Ontario called “Slapshot”. I ran into Bob Gainey, Pierre Gauthier, and Trevor Timmins one day in the Corel Centre parking lot in Ottawa during the annual rookie tournament and handed them each a copy of my newspaper. It was my introduction to Timmins, who grew up 20 minutes away from my hometown of Renfrew in Arnprior, and we exchanged phone numbers.
I began calling Trevor on occasion and eventually coaxed him into giving me his email; a decision he probably regrets to this day as I haven’t stopped bugging him about the draft ever since. In 2007, after realizing that the publishing industry was dying and that the future of sports journalism was on the internet, I started publishing periodical hockey magazines instead of weekly ones and got involved in scouting/writing with McKeen’s. I had never stopped following the draft and had also followed my parents back to their hometown of Shawville. Qc. in the mid-2000s, where I became acquainted with Tim Murray and Todd Hearty, who were scouting for their uncle Bryan Murray at the time in Florida and then Anaheim.
I would often bombard them with questions about draft-eligible prospects, and gained a reputation on social media as a competent draft follower who caught the eye of McKeen’s publisher Iain Morrell with my posts about prospects on HF Boards.
Established McKeen’s Draft Guide
After establishing McKeen’s draft guide in 2007 and frequenting junior hockey arenas, studying tape on prospects and interviewing as many scouts, GM’s and coaches as possible over the next two years, I was evolving into a half-decent scout. Timmins offered me a part-time position scouting with the Habs in Eastern Ontario/Western Quebec. I may have been paid as a part-time scout but I treated it like a full-time job and poured my heart into the work. It was a dream come true scouting for the Montreal Canadiens – who were managed by Bob Gainey at the time.
My father, who passed away in 2011 after a lengthy battle with cancer, was never prouder of me. He would go down for a coffee in the mornings at the social hot spot and tell anyone in Shawville who would listen that I was a scout for the Canadiens; a team he grew up cheering for and idolizing. He passed on that fandom to me.
Unfortunately, Gainey decided to step down after the 2010 season, and the new man in charge, Pierre Gauthier, believed in having a skeleton scouting staff. He eliminated several scouting positions, including mine, and it has never been filled by another part-time scout ever since.
I kept working as the head scout for McKeen’s, co-publishing their draft rankings (I had published their first-ever draft guide in 2007), and I also found work writing draft profiles for Bob McKenzie’s top 60 list on TSN.ca for the 2011 draft. I had gotten to know Bob over the years and he helped get me the writing job, but when Craig Button was hired after that season it was decided by TSN’s executives that he would write Bob’s profiles in addition to all of his other draft work.
The next two seasons I worked for the Hockey News, compiling the draft rankings for their annual Draft Preview. I also returned to work for McKeen’s as their chief amateur scout in 2014 after a two-year hiatus.
As time went along it struck me that I not only had the connections but also the background to offer people scouting notes and opinions from NHL scouts’ perspectives in addition offering my own views. As a draft junkie, I had always been fascinated by what the NHL scouts thought about prospects leading up to the draft, and the only place where you ever got any semblance of that was from The Hockey News’ annual Draft Preview. For a draft aficionado like me, it never really seemed like enough.
I made the big decision at the start of 2017 to leave McKeen’s and start a scouting service called Recrutes. The following summer, I recruited Brian Wilde and launched Montreal Canadiens news to supplement the draft coverage.
Brian stuck around for a year but wasn’t prepared for the “low pay for long hours” that came with running a small subscription-based hockey website. Even though I kept the annual price as low as possible, folks were still reluctant to pay for their hockey news, and while I truly appreciate the support I received from loyal subscribers over the seven years that I operated Recrutes, I was unable to justify keeping it going from a financial standpoint. I made the difficult decision after the 2024 NHL Draft to pull the plug.
The Sick Podcast Network
I would not have done so if another exciting opportunity had not arisen with the Cavallaros and the Sick Podcast Network.
I began appearing on Tony Marinaro’s Sick Podcast a couple of years ago and got to know Sammy and Aniello, who run the network. They offered to give me my own podcast that focused on the NHL draft called the Sick Podcast Recrutes Draftcast, and in the past year, we have built up a loyal following: https://www.youtube.com/@SickPodcastRecrutesDraftcast.
Here is Sammy’s story – https://thesickpodcast.com/our-story
When I informed Sammy and Aniello that I was planning on shutting down my website, they suggested that I join them in an exciting new venture called Sick Sports News. They have branched out from their podcast network to include free sports news on their website, and we are launching it today with Habs, Bruins, NHL and draft coverage. Jimmy Murphy, formerly of Boston Hockey Now, also has a Sick Podcast with Pierre McGuire called The Eye Test, and I look forward to working with him on this exciting new project.
The Cavallaros are wonderful people, and Sammy is a burgeoning sports entrepreneur, so I have no doubts that this will be successful. I plan on providing both Habs and draft fans with extensive free coverage, and I will now be making my draft rankings public for the very first time. I hope you can support us simply by reading the content and helping us prosper.
So there you have it. Welcome to Sick Sports News! We are launching the site officially tonight with a look at NHL U25 depth charts. I compiled a depth chart for every NHL team and ranked them from best to worst. This project will prosper with your input and support. I hope my insights, videos and writing can keep you coming back for me, and if you do, there are great days ahead. Let’s have some fun!
