What are teams looking for in NHL combine interviews?
I'm headed to Buffalo this morning. Let's have a quick chat about what teams are doing.
Good morning from the airport.
I’m flying to Buffalo this morning for the NHL Scouting Combine, where many of the top prospects for the 2026 NHL Draft will meet with NHL teams and lay some of the groundwork for the draft later this month, also in Buffalo.
This will be my first trip to the combine, it’s actually one of the few things that I haven’t covered before within the NHL Draft cycle, so I’ll have a better “boots on the ground,” piece on that later this weekend.
In the meantime, I had a reader ask me the other day a question that I think is worth diving into.
What are teams looking for when the interview players or take them to dinner at the combine?
Over the next couple days you’ll see on social media that Player X met with Team Y, and that a player met with this many teams. For example, I’ve got a meeting lined up later today with a player, who is projected to go in the top-15 range, that has 24 team meetings scheduled.
In many cases, for teams, these meetings are about fleshing out information about a prospect that’s been initially gleaned through the scouting process. They’ll be questions about a player’s season, why they did or didn’t have success, while they’ll also be inquiries where various teams try to learn more about a player’s personality. There are a handful of teams that really big on that second part, and there have been stories of players dropping in the draft or landing on “do-not-draft,” lists because of how poorly they came off to a certain team in an interview.
There have also been players that have improved their draft stock in the interview process, Ty Dellandrea, for example really wowed the Stars in his interview back in 2018 and when the Stars drafted him they were confident they’d gotten a future captain, “a Mike Fisher type,” with the pick.
Social media postings from reporters about a team meeting with a player is also not an indicator that a team will or won’t draft a player. I think too often it gets misconstrued that a team really likes a player, similar to how hockey media/fans often overreact to scouts being in the building.
One NHL scouting director once explained it to me this way, “it’s an information business. We are building databases of information for this draft, but for the long-term as well. There might be a trade or some other opportunity to acquire a player in the future, the combine is probably the real first-impression to build your notes on a player.”