Siren leads the way as the Blue Jackets hope for another big draft

This is Ville Siren's Super Bowl week.

For a full year, the Blue Jackets director of amateur scouting and his crew of 10 scouts traversed the world to watch the world's top young hockey players.

It's grueling work, but the payoff comes this week, as Columbus enters the NHL draft with seven selections, including the No. 3 overall choice. If all goes well, those seven players will become franchise building blocks if not stars, and Siren and his crew will get to take victory laps as the Stanley Cup is paraded around the Nationwide Arena ice.

But, as Siren is aware, it doesn't always work out that way.

"We are more wrong than we are right," Siren said. "Because let's say if two players each draft make it to the NHL, then we did a really good job. Our job is very humbling. It's very challenging because we are looking at 17- and 18-year-old guys. There's a lot of moving parts before they make it to the NHL if they make it."

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The reality is, though, that the Blue Jackets have done a solid job in recent seasons when it comes to handling the draft. Rookies Kent Johnson (2021 draft) and Kirill Marchenko (2018) are coming off breakout seasons, Cole Sillinger (2021) has already spent two seasons in the NHL, David Jiricek (2022) had an All-Star season at the AHL level, and a bevy of other youngsters have helped Columbus put together one of the top prospect pipelines in the game.

And as Siren gets set to captain the ship for his 10th draft with the Blue Jackets, general manager Jarmo Kekalainen said there's no one else he'd rather have leading the way.

"He doesn't leave any stones unturned," Kekalainen said of the former NHL defenseman. "We're always going to make mistakes in scouting, and as long as we do our work and do our due diligence and watch the games don't take any shortcuts, if we make a mistake, so be it. I know I can trust 100 percent that Ville is always going to do the work. He's relentless in doing that."

A Life in Hockey

A native of Tampere, Finland, Siren began his pro hockey career during the 1982-83 season with Ilves in his hometown, and at the end of his first year with the club, he was chosen in the second round of the 1983 NHL Draft by the Hartford Whalers.

There weren't a ton of Finns in the NHL at the time -- the first NHL great from the country, Edmonton star Jari Kurri, debuted in 1981 with the Oilers -- but the floodgates of Europeans crossing the Atlantic to come to the North American ranks were starting to open. Eight Finns were taken in that 1983 draft, all in the first seven rounds of what was then an 11-round affair.

Siren played three total seasons on the blue line with Ilves and skated in the 1984 Olympics before he headed to North America. By the start of that 1985-86 season, his rights had been traded from Hartford to Pittsburgh, and when he arrived in the Steel City, he was the only European on the roster. The Penguins would add Swedish wing Willy Lindstrom that season as well, but of the top 20 scorers on the squad, those were the only two Europeans; 16 were Canadian, with other two Americans.

Still, crossing the Atlantic to play in the best league in the world was something Siren had circled.

"It's pretty much everybody's dream to play in the NHL," Siren said.

He arrived in Pittsburgh not to play for a dynasty but on a team that finished 10th in the 11-team Prince of Wales Conference. The squad had a young star named Mario Lemieux, though, and would slowly but surely start to build its way to Stanley Cup wins in 1991 and '92.

Siren didn't get to see those memorable squads, though, as he was traded to Minnesota in December 1988. He finished that season and one other with the North Stars before heading back to Europe, having posted 14 goals and 82 points in 290 NHL games.

His hockey career was far from over, though. Siren played a season with HPK Hameenlinna for a year, returned to Ilves for another (and skated in the 1992 Olympics), then played three seasons in Sweden with Lulea and Vasteras. After three years in Switzerland, he returned to HIFK in Helsinki to play his the last of his 17 professional seasons.

He considered an 18th, but a call from the Washington Capitals changed that.

"I was asked to be an amateur scout," he said. "I was thinking maybe I'd keep continue playing, but then one day I got a phone call and I was asked to be a scout. And I said, 'Ahh, maybe I'll retire.' That's how it went.

"My last year playing was pretty tough. More mentally than physically, and I made a decision it was time to do something else."

A Lifetime Bond

Truth be told, though, Siren had done a little scouting in previous seasons, thanks in part to a friend.

When Siren was preparing to head to Pittsburgh in 1985 but still training with Ilves, the squad brought in a young wing named Jarmo Kekalainen to join the squad. The two became familiar with one another, then both headed on North American adventures -- Siren in the NHL, Kekalainen at first to play at Clarkson University.

Located in upstate New York, Clarkson isn't too far from a fair share of NHL rinks, so the two Finns would get together whenever they could. They remained friends throughout their careers that both eventually ended up back in Europe, and during the 1994-95 season, they were teammates with Vasteras in Sweden. There, the scouting bug for both began to take hold.

"We went to the games on off days to watch the players," Siren said. "Now we are here."

It wasn't a straight line, of course. Kekalainen retired after that season and was hired as general manager with HIFK, but he picked up a side job as a European scout for the Ottawa Senators, where his friend Ray Shero was an assistant general manager. Shero often tells the story of how he offered Kekalainen a small sum -- just a few thousand dollars -- for the gig, only to get a return call from Kekalainen asking if he could split the money with Siren just to get his friend into the business.

Once Siren hung up the skates for good, he started with the Capitals, but he and Kekalainen were reunited in 2003-04. By then, Kekalainen had become director of amateur scouting with the St. Louis Blues, and he hired Siren as one of his scouts.

The two worked together until Kekalainen left the Blues in 2010, but in 2013, when he took over as the full-time general manager of the Blue Jackets, Kekalainen made Siren his head amateur scout that summer and promoted him to director of amateur scouting in 2016.

It's not hard to imagine the discussions between the two Finns -- one more stoic, one more animated -- about players over the past decade.

"He challenges me a lot, but it's part of the process," Siren said. "We all work for the same team. I say my opinion. That's why I get paid. That's my job."

He also couldn't help but laugh as he continued.

"We have healthy conversations, but also we have had hard conversations, too, when we maybe disagree. Sometimes we have different opinions about players, and then you might go back and see what the scouts or Jarmo says. And that's how we put together our opinion."

Kekalainen agreed.

"I don't think that we beat around the bush with our conversations," the GM said. "If I disagree with him, I'll tell him. And if he disagrees with me, he'll tell me. That's the way it should be. That's why we've been friends for a long time. But it's not about friendship here. This is a business. I've hired him because I think he's the best man for the job."

Finishing the Job

It's not hard to like Siren, as his booming voice and personality stand out.

His English is quite good after about four decades spent in and out of North America, but many Blue Jackets fans likely know him most for his announcement of the team's top pick on stage at the draft throughout his tenure.

Kekalainen often gives him that right as the head of the CBJ scouting department, but it's not the easiest thing to do in your second language in front of a full arena, not to mention millions of others watching around the world. Siren says he's gotten better over the years, but that sort of public speaking still doesn't come naturally.

"I would say so, yeah," he said. "It's not my favorite part."

Kekalainen said he'll announce the pick tomorrow, which is fine for Ville because the scouting, on the other hand, is much more up his alley. After having just three draft picks in the 2019 draft, a result of the squad's playoff push that season, the Blue Jackets have remade the organization over the past three drafts with help from Siren and his crew.

Seven of the 21 choices from the past three years already have made NHL debuts, with such names as Johnson, Sillinger, Jiricek and Yegor Chinakhov first-round picks who are thought to be major building blocks for the team going forwards. Stanislav Svozil, Samuel Knazko and Mikael Pyythia also have played NHL games despite being taken in the past three years, and such names as Denton Mateychuk, Luca Del Bel Belluz, Jordan Dumais, Corson Ceulemans and James Malatesta, among others, are expected to follow.

The hope is the Blue Jackets will have similar successes tomorrow. It's the Super Bowl, after all, but for scouts, it's all about the process that gets you there.

"You start and then you try to find out the players, and once you figure them out, you say, 'OK, what's the order?'" Siren said. "And then at the end we come to the conclusion and we go with it. It's exciting. But it's also making hard decisions. That's part of the business."