Mike Addesa, a scout with the Vancouver Canucks, laughs when asked what his job really entails.
A hockey lifer from Boston who now patrols the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and colleges along the East Coast, Addesa of course watches teenagers and 20-somethings play. His point, though, is there’s far more to the profession than meets the eye.
"I can’t even begin to tell you how many people over the years have asked me the question, ‘You really get paid just to go sit and watch hockey games?’" Addesa said. "It’s amazing that people have no idea of how in depth the science is to it, and it’s very, very subjective."
The world Addesa alludes to is one where written reports ring true, the 10,000-hour rule persists and relationships are currency. It’s a way for rink rats to stay in the game they love, hoping to shape their organization’s future and maybe — just maybe — help discover the player who brings a Stanley Cup to their city.
That’s the bare bones of it, but scouts insist that their lifestyle is not glamorous. Rather, as Ron Anderson, a two-time NCAA champ at BU, former Merrimack head coach and now director of player recruitment for the Chicago Blackhawks, puts it, it’s a grind.
"There’s no perfect science to this," Anderson said. "You see a lot of bad hockey games, see a lot of bad players, drink a lot of bad coffee, eat a lot of bad food, stay in a lot of bad hotels, all to try and come up with a good player once in awhile. People look at the success when you finally find someone and say, ‘That’s great. That sounds like fun.’ It’s a lot of hard work and you come up with nothing more than you come up with something."
Anderson’s matter-of-fact interpretation of the scouting world is jam-packed, but it touches on the nucleus of it all, a competitive business where credibility and your opinion is all you’ve got.
And, woven into all that, is a network of sorts, one where a hierarchy rings true.
Each scout has a designated area, typically based on geography, and leagues or levels they grow to master. That could manifest as the prep school scene in New England, college free agents out west, the European market, juniors or even the professional game itself. Scouts will watch players upward of a half-dozen times so when their front office comes asking, they can, as Matt Harlow (Bridgewater, Mass.), an amateur scout with the New York Islanders, said, "go to bat for their guy."
Whether it’s at meetings before the summer’s NHL Entry Draft or as the trade deadline nears and a team is considering a blockbuster move, a scout needs to be ready to fire from the hip, giving their bluntly honest take on a player.
"The bottom line is they pay us for our opinions," Harlow said. "At those meetings, if there’s a guy you believe in that is a good kid and is going to play in the NHL some day, when they ask you about him, you need to tell them that and not be afraid to vouch for him."
The ultimate decision, however, lies in the hands of a general manager or higher-up and reveals a catch-22 of sorts. Scouts travel far and wide and rarely see the reward of their labors.
So, why stay in it? Bill Armstrong (Warwick, R.I.), director of scouting for the St. Louis Blues, said the answer is simple. "Those guys are not only hockey people, but they’re the most committed people you can ever imagine," Armstrong said. "Your Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays are spent on the road, hustling and looking for players in greasy, grimy rinks from here to Russia and all over. It’s really a dirty, grimy job at the end of the day, and people always say, ‘Oh, I’d love to have your job. You get to watch hockey for a living.’ It’s not like that.
"You’re constantly on the road, you’re constantly in an airplane, in a rental car, in a Marriott," Armstrong added. "You constantly go 24/7 and that happens from September all the way to basically April. Really, you have to take that three-hour plane ride and then you have to get in the car for two hours and battle the lines of security and all the other delays you have to face in a day. Then you’re lining up to get your rental car, you’re lining up to get your hotel, you’re lining up to get into the rink. It’s a full-on grind and it starts at 7 in the morning and goes all the way until 11 o’clock at night, and then you do the same thing the next day."
It’s a culture that Toby O’Brien (Newport, R.I.), who most recently was director of amateur scouting with the Florida Panthers, has come to know and love. He estimates that upper-end scouts spend about 120 nights a year in a hotel, racking up 80,000 to 90,000 airline miles. A lot of it is thankless work, too, one where you’re away from your family for days, sometimes even weeks, at a time, all to watch a player your organization likely will never employ.
But every once in awhile, a scout strikes gold, and O’Brien said that’s when the job truly feels rewarding. His go-to story occurred during the 2013-14 season when he was scouting in the Czech Republic.
O’Brien’s assignment was to drive several hours to a rink in Pardubice to watch a defenseman who played on Sparta Praha. He can’t remember the blueliner’s name, largely because the kid skated just a couple shifts the whole game.
He debated leaving, but then a forward wearing No. 92 caught his eye. O’Brien glanced down at his line chart and saw it was Tomas Nosek, now of the Detroit Red Wings organization. Just like that, O’Brien’s assignment changed, he tracked down Nosek’s agent, had dinner with him and learned his back story. Nosek was his diamond in the rough.
"It’s a self-rewarding thing where you may never get credit for it, you may never see it through, but it was actually the art of pure scouting," O’Brien said. "We don’t do that a lot anymore. For me, I’ll remember that and tell my kids because that was one of those things where you know what, it just happened. I was driving, I was working the road, I was a road warrior and all of a sudden I got rewarded the old-fashioned way."
Tales like O’Brien’s are hard to come by, but scouts, especially those who travel internationally, have stories of a different color. They’re ones of traveling to watch a game or tournament, and then everything goes sideways.
Jeff Kealty (Framingham, Mass.), head of amateur scouting with the Western Conference champion Nashville Predators, recalled a story from 2010 when the U-18 World Championships were in Minsk, Belarus. There was a U-20 tournament going on in Sweden, so Kealty, along with a few other scouts, flew to Stockholm for a couple days, fully expecting to soon return to Minsk.
Mother Nature, however, had other ideas in mind. A volcano erupted, grounding flights in Europe, and Kealty was left scrambling to find a way to watch the remainder of the tournament. Their solution was, in short, unorthodox.
"Our Swedish scout talked to his travel agent and they came up with a plan for us to take an overnight cruise that went from Stockholm to Riga, Latvia," Kealty said. "A member of the Belarus ice hockey federation then drove eight hours from Minsk to Riga, picked us up and drove eight hours back to Minsk. That’s how we made it back. For everyone who says, ‘Oh, you just get to go around and watch hockey,’ you have some crazy travel days and some crazy experiences."
Each scout has his stories, but each also his their take on what separates the good from the bad, the subjective from the objective.
Their business, at its core, concerns watching players and interpreting what they offer on the ice. It’s what Mike Doneghey (West Roxbury, Mass.), head U.S. scout for the Chicago Blackhawks, said is the easy part of the gig.
What’s harder, he said, is reading people and getting to understand their personalities, how they’ll fit into a locker room or jell with an organization’s philosophy. Those riddles are why Judd Brackett (Harwich, Mass.), director of amateur scouting with the Vancouver Canucks, said one-on-one conversations — be it with the local Zamboni driver, snack-bar attendant, coaches or the players themselves — prove vital.
"Just as critical is knowing what a player’s mental makeup is, how they treat others, what kind of person they are, their ability to persevere and push back against adversity," Brackett said. "These are all things you have to know. It’s not going to be easy getting there, and they’re going to have challenges along the way. What coping mechanisms are they going to use to get there? What family values have been instilled in them at a young age?"
But solving those questions is hardly a straightforward endeavor, and that’s why scouts agree: Patience is a precious virtue in their trade. Doneghey joked that scouting is like "260 days of Groundhog Day," and during that span, there are going to be plenty of duds, times where your plan just doesn’t go as you hoped.
It happened with him before the 2016 draft, when he traveled to Montreal to watch Frederic Allard, now a Predators prospect. Every previous time, Allard either had an injury or wasn’t doing much in the game, so Doneghey hoped this could be his breakthrough.
Allard was on the ice for warmups, and everything looked good. But then the game started, and he was not on the bench.
"Apparently he had the flu all day and was just giving it a go in warmups," Doneghey said. "You’re at a game and you’re ready to go, and all of a sudden you look over and this kid’s in the next section. It’s an injury that happened that you didn’t hear about. I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s happened to."
Like any profession, the world of scouting is changing. There’s more video to watch, more metrics to break down, advanced testing at the combine, in-depth interviews and psychological tests. There are metrics through which staffs can analyze players, and the general consensus is scouts should utilize all the tools they can.
The bread and butter, though, is a scout’s trained eye, and that won’t ever change.
"It’s not a computer game, it’s not a board game," Anderson said. "There’s no substitute for personal, hands-on contact and evaluation. … You can use all the data and analytics and video you want as support materials for evaluating players, but you still have to see them."
Added Kealty: "At the end of the day, there’s really no substitute for the eye, the feel, the experience, the having lived it to really feel like you’ve mastered this. And even then there’s always surprises and there’s always things that open your eyes. All the other advances and aspects of technology, the tools, they help you, but there’s no substitute for the real core of scouting."
And that very core leads to scouts’ golden tales, like when Addesa saw Daren Puppa, a veteran of nearly 400 pro games through the 1980s and ’90s, for the first time. Addesa heard rumblings that there was a 16-year-old goalie playing in an adult league up in Kirkland Lake, Ontario.
He wasn’t sure how to get there, but found a solution: Three connecting flights, with the last one a six-seater plane.
"It’s not quite comical, but shows the things you do to try and recognize a player," Addesa said. "You hear a little whisper and it might lead you to the pot of gold."
There’s scouting in a nutshell: Searching for that one big break, no matter where it takes you.
