Let me tell you a story about Riley Tufte

Some musings, and ramblings, from catching up with a player after morning skate today.

This is one of those stories, that in a traditional sense, won’t please the algorithm.

No one is actively seeking stories about Riley Tufte, right?

A quad-A player for the Boston Bruins, now 27 years old, Tufte is going to be a healthy scratch in tonight’s game between the Bruins and Detroit Red Wings. He put in close to 45 minutes of work during morning skate on Tuesday.

In fact, there was still 20 minutes for me to kill between the end of Bruins regular media availability and Tufte getting off the ice.

(This did allow me to catch up with Don, the security guard at Little Caesars Arena, where we talked about international travel he’s taken before and the shrimp and grits he recently made. If you want to go into this business, talk to everyone, you never know where you find a good story.)

OK, I’m rambling a bit… let’s get this back on track.

I want to write about Tufte, because it’s a good explainer of how this business works and, more importantly, how important the people side of the business is to actually capturing great stories.

I’ve known Tufte since 2016. I wasn’t at the NHL Draft that year, I remember tracking it on my phone while at a rehearsal dinner for my friend Matt’s wedding, but got to know Tufte soon after the Stars picked him with the 25th overall pick.

Tufte’s time with the Stars never really lived up to expectations. After three seasons at Minnesota-Duluth, including back-to-back NCAA titles, his four seasons in Texas were spent primarily in the AHL, and he only played 13 NHL games for Dallas.

He has since settled into that reliable depth quad-A role, first for the Colorado Avalanche, and now for Boston after leaving the Stars organization and having the first-round pick expectations removed.

On an outside level, Tufte is a pretty good example of how draft status changes our view of expectations. His career, because of where he was drafted, is going to be considered a bust, and it really doesn’t help that Tage Thompson was taken one pick later by the St. Louis Blues.

He will never get away from those expectations nor what happened in the draft, that’s a fact of life.

But for a pretty raw prospect, who chose to play high school hockey in Minnesota instead of the National Team Development Program during his draft year, and someone who embraced a longer development path in college, Tufte has turned into a decent model for how larger players should and need to develop.

Tufte needed time to unlearn habits he picked up by being the biggest kid on the ice, he needed time to add strength to his frame and finesse his skating. In Dallas, he learned these things, but because of the draft label, was always expected to move quicker than he was.

Again, I’m rambling a bit, but the point here, is that while we often look at the players that are in the top 1 percent of their archetype, we learn the most lessons and probably can gain more for our future decisions from the others.

Tufte shouldn’t have been a first-round pick, I think we can agree on that with hindsight, but he should have been a project for someone to invest in with lesser draft expectations.

The other thing Tufte brings up, for me, is how important the human side of this business is. Tufte and I spent most of our conversation today speaking about our kids, his oldest son is around the same as my son, so we talked about kindergarten and learn-to-skate classes, about managing life as a dad rather than life as a hockey player.

I learned a bit about the Bruins and we had some hockey conversation, but those chats, human-to-human, are my favorite part of the job, and they open other relationships. There were two other Bruins players still in the locker room while Tufte and I was talking, they ended up chatting with us as well and, in the long run, that’s how you find other human stories to tell.

Tufte, for example, is one of the reasons I have strong relationship with Stars goalie Jake Oettinger. Tufte and Oettinger criss-crossed paths growing up, and Oettinger was famously drafted in 2017 by Dallas a year after Tufte was selected.

One of the door-opening moments in my early conversations with Oettinger was because of Tufte, and I remember a then 18-year-old Oettinger being much more open to chat with me after talking with Tufte at the same Stars development camp.

Again, this is one of those pieces that I’m not really sure whether it makes sense or not. It certainly doesn’t please the “content” algorithm, in fact I’m not even sure if I’ll post this on social media — twitter is pretty much dead if you are posting a link — but it’s something I thought about and found interesting today, so I’m sharing it with you.

As always, thanks for reading, the fact that this space has grown and people find these musings interesting is one of my favorite parts of this job.

I’ll have more nerdy hockey stuff in this space with in the next 24 hours, too.