Scoping the NHL Combine

During the last 12 months, the Kraken hockey operations group has put together a list of 300 prospects deemed possible selections for the 2022 NHL Draft July 7 and 8 in Montreal. Ninety-six of those players were in Buffalo in late May and early June for the league's Scouting Combine, providing a chance to test the athletes' fitness, conduct medical exams and connect during in-person interviews.
It marked the first combine in three seasons. The last two were canceled due to COVID-19 protocols. The Kraken, like all NHL teams, turned to video conferences to get a feel for the personalities of players like top Seattle draft choices such as center Matty Beniers, defenseman Ryker Evans and forward Ryan Winterton (who is still playing meaningful hockey with his team qualifying for the elite juniors Memorial Cup tourney June 20 to 29 by winning the Ontario Hockey League championship Wednesday).

"We create profiles on players and come in with a solid idea about individuals," says Robert Kron, the Kraken's director of amateur scouting. "But it's good to meet face-to-face. We're glad to have the combine back in-person.
"We get a better feel for the athlete. We have a psychologist who talks to the kids with us [during the combine interviews]. It provides another angle for us. It's a piece of the puzzle. During the season, we talk to coaches, team staff, everybody, to understand how players interact."
Dan Marr, director of NHL Central Scouting and its player rankings, labels the combine as "a rite of passage on a player's path to the NHL." The prospects themselves might see it both opportunity and gauntlet.
The group of 63 forwards, 30 defensemen and three goalies were talking to individual NHL teams from Monday, May 30 through Friday, June 3. All players underwent medical exams June 3 before they could participate in fitness testing.

Seven of the 11 fitness tests rolled out Saturday, June 4, to complete a busy schedule for the prospects, including saving the Wingate Cycle Ergometer test as the final physical challenge on that Saturday. Kraken head strength and conditioning coach Nate Brookreson and assistant strength and conditioning coach Jake Jensen, who supervised the pull-up station, were on hand to provide their expert analysis of fitness test results to Seattle's hockey operations brain trust.
Brookreson says he especially values four specific tests: the ergometer bike test for maximum oxygen capacity, the standing long jump, the vertical jump and a pro agility test that requires shuttling quickly in multiple directions.
"I like those test for evaluating athletic quality," says Brookreson. "The VO2 max bike test is 30 seconds going as hard as you can. It gives a sense of somebody's ability to sustain output over the course of a shift, it's a look at average power output.
"The test happens at the very end [of the week-long combine]. You get to see how much somebody has left in the tank after going through an entire gamut of interviews and tests and everything. It shows what kind of intensity you are still bringing."
Brookreson said the vertical jump station provides three different formats of tests. One, for example, requires the player to squat and hold before leaping. Another is a fluid vertical jump but hands on hips, while the third allows use of the arms for added force. If you think about the puck battles and physical tie-ups players encounter during a typical NHL game, all three of those physical movements would be in use, probably multiple times in the same shift.

"You can find if players are they good at creating force in low positions," says Brookreson. "How coordinated are they with their arms?"
Brookreson closely watched the pro agility test, one also used at the National Football League combine. He says the off-ice test translates effectively enough to players' agility on the rink.
"You get a sense of how players sprint, how they change directions, how they move in space so off and cross over."
Nonetheless, like any fitness testing across sports, the results are indicators but not the final determination of skills unfurled during competition. Brookreson calls them "surrogate measures" and, importantly, says the 96 prospects in Buffalo proved a "homogenous population" with narrow statistically significant difference between the top 10 and bottom 10.
To the point, the top prospects are generally in promising physical shape and those fitness tests, medical exams and in-person interviews from the combine have been added to deep files on those 96 players (plus another 200-plus) kept by the Kraken hockey operations group. The final list of 300 in order of draft-preference will be "tweaked" right up until picks are made July 7 and 8 at the NHL Draft in Montreal, says Seattle GM Ron Francis.