I feel like I write or Tweet something about this annually.
Scouts are scouting, it typically doesn’t mean anything else.
Let me explain.
I’m writing this from the press box in Detroit before the game between the Detroit Red Wings game against the Vancouver Canucks.
To my left there are seats reserved in the press box for scouts from Carolina Hurricanes, Seattle Kraken, Minnesota Wild, Winnipeg Jets, New Jersey Devils, Calgary Flames, Chicago Blackhawks, and Anaheim Ducks.
The Ducks have three people here scouting. The Devils have two. The assistant GM for the Kraken is here.
That’s enough info for a juicy tweet/rumor about how the Ducks are heavily tracking the Red Wings and Canucks. Maybe Seattle is pulling the trigger soon on a trade with one of these teams, right?
Wrong.
Seattle’s assistant GM Jason Botterill is based in Michigan, his name is on the scout list for nearly every Red Wings home game. Of the Ducks three scouts, two of them are amateur scouts who happened to be in the area because they were scouting the under-18 Five Nations tournament earlier this week.
Scouting assignments rarely have anything to do with future transactions. Hockey is an information business, thousands of scouting reports are filed daily across the hockey world as teams try to build the greatest possible database of information.
I spoke with five different NHL GMs earlier this week at the Five Nations tournament, a couple of them mentioned potentially watching this game between the Canucks and Red Wings before heading back to Plymouth for the finale of the under-18 showcase this evening between USA and Sweden — it has nothing do with trading for a player on either of these NHL teams.
It’s just something to keep in mind. Scout lists and Tweets about them — and I used to do it quite a bit in Dallas because I was still a younger, more naive reporter — are the nothing burgers of hockey coverage.
Enjoy your Saturday.