When then-Lightning general manager Steve Yzerman was considering taking Brayden Point in the third round of the 2014 NHL Draft in Philadelphia, he had a ton of guidance within earshot.
There were around 15 executives and scouts at Tampa Bay’s rectangular table on the draft floor at Wells Fargo Arena. They wore suits, blending from gray to black to pinstripe, and sat in their red folding chairs, the kind that fill backyards for barbecues. They all had sheets of paper in front of them with the team’s draft lists. These prospect rankings were the result of exhaustive collaboration between dozens of scouts, meaning thousands of man-hours in tiny rinks from Sioux City to Spokane. This proprietary list is like gold and is protected as such, which is why the Lightning don’t have open laptops on their draft-floor table.
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Yzerman had taken defensemen with his first three picks of the draft, including Tony DeAngelo in the first round, but told scouts he wanted to focus on size that year, feeling like his team had been pushed around a bit. Tampa Bay was due to take a forward, however, and Point — a 5-foot-9, 160-pounder from Calgary — was among the higher-rated guys left after his stellar junior career in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Yzerman, thinking Minnesota would take Point, traded a seventh-rounder to the Wild to move up one spot to get in premier position. They were on the clock, with three minutes to pick.
Before Yzerman called it in, he looked down the table and asked scout Brad Whelen to come over.
“I’m like, ‘Holy smokes, what do I do?'” Whelen recalled recently.
You see, Yzerman may be a Hall of Famer, but it was Whelen, 47, the area scout in Western Canada, who likely knew Point the best. Whelen saw Point play countless times, wrote up reports, interviewed him and met his family.
“What do I need to know?” Yzerman asked.
“Well,” Whelen said, admittedly nervous. “He’s not very big. Not all that strong. I’d say he’s more quick than fast.
“But I do know one thing. When it all matters at the end, he’ll be the one there.”
Whelen walked back to his seat. The Lightning took Point with the 79th pick. Point, of course, has turned into one of the top 10 players in the world, a catalyst for back-to-back Stanley Cup championships. Teams mortgage their future for a No. 1 center, overpay in free agency. Tampa Bay got theirs on day two of the draft.
“It’s a day I’ll never forget,” Whelen says.
For an amateur scout, this is their Stanley Cup. You rarely hear from them or know their names. But if the draft is the lifeblood of any organization, these scouts provide the oxygen. Scouts like Whelen spend 150-plus nights on the road, catching more than 200 games, which is good for their Marriott status but tough on a husband and a father of two. They spend their nights in Everett, Wash., or Kamloops, B.C., at tiny junior rinks trying to project what 15- or 16-year-old kid might be an NHLer five years from now. Their postgame routines include writing reports on a computer program or hustling to a hotel to interview a prospect. They don’t make a ton of money, perhaps $60,000 to $75,000, and if you break it down by the hour, let’s say it’s a lot of bang for the team’s buck.
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“People just think you go to a game and then go home,” Lightning scouting director Al Murray said. “But they have no idea.”
Spend a weekend on the road with a scout like Whelen and you’ll see how the Cup champs build their roster.
At around 8 a.m. on this rainy, mid-November morning, Whelen pops into the concierge lounge — which he calls “the pantry” — on the seventh floor.
The Delta Marriott in Everett is a go-to spot for Whelen on trips to the Seattle area. He’s here to see four games in four nights, two in Everett, one in Kent and a Seattle Kraken game in between (he likes to stay current on NHLers). Whelen doesn’t care if he’s an hour from the Space Needle and Pike Place Market. He prefers a central location, a spacious suite, a home away from home for about a week.
His real home is Devon, Alberta, a tiny town of 6,500 just outside of Edmonton. On this trip, Whelen flew into Vancouver before making the two- to three-hour drive down to Seattle. He was on Highway 1 a day earlier listening to sports talk radio when he got a call from assistant GM Stacy Roest, informing him the first game on his schedule — Spokane at Everett — had been postponed.
“It’s COVID issues,” Roest tells him.
“That’s our ‘new normal’ now,” Whelen says. “Expect the unexpected.”
Whelen, wearing a Lightning cap and Under Armour shorts and T-shirt, snags a yogurt and pastry and heads back to his room. He’s got a few calls to make before leaving for Everett practice at 11:15 a.m. The most important one is his daily video call with his family. His wife, Allison, and two boys, Brady, 14, and Riley, 12, are home on their school’s fall break.
These calls are just catching up on the day, the kids’ schedule and life with their new puppy, Finley, a Maltese-Corgie mix that the family adopted recently. He hates being away. But he loves his job.
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“My wife tells me that I’m the only guy who — if I won the lottery — would keep working,” Whelen says.
“He doesn’t have an off switch,” Allison says.
Like many amateur scouts, Whelen doesn’t have a hockey pedigree or HockeyDB page. He grew up playing, of course. He was a goalie, but not a particularly good one. He recalls a Canada Winter Games camp he went to with Roest as a 15-year-old. “I had no business being there,” Whelen says. “I told Roest he probably scored a few on me, and he laughed. I was more happy sitting on the bench watching the good players than playing in the game.
“I guess that’s why I became a scout.”
Whelen didn’t have the skills, but he always had a good eye and memory. As a kid, he collected hockey cards, and he could tell from each one — by the signage on the boards — in which arena the photos were taken. He knew which guys were right or left shots. His childhood home was a 15-minute walk from a big mall outside of Edmonton, where there was a nearby rink that had major Triple-A teams playing. He’d often walk over and watch several games on a Saturday, or he’d tag along for one of his friend’s Western Hockey League games. He’d get to know the players and scouts, who gave him their draft list from the 1979 age group.
Watching hockey, at least back then, didn’t pay the bills. So, Whelen got a chemical technology degree from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT). He worked part-time in a lab where they’d test waste oil and make sure it was safe to dispose of, and then full-time at a pharmaceutical company in quality assurance.
But when the Calgary Hitmen of the WHL asked Whelen if he wanted to be an area scout, he jumped. He was 26 and single. It wasn’t a lot of money, maybe $30,000, but it became a career. He spent 15 seasons with the Hitmen, going from regional scout to head scout and then assistant GM. He helped build teams that included players like Ryan Getzlaf, Martin Jones, Karl Alzner and Michael Stone.
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While with Calgary, Whelen met Allison at a game in Winnipeg, where she lived. They had dinner at Earl’s that trip, then dated long distance for a while until she moved to Devon. He proposed four years later, waking her up in the middle of the night because he couldn’t wait until morning to pop the question. Their honeymoon was in a mountain town called Jasper in Alberta. They were on a romantic hike to the top of Mount Robson when Whelen’s phone buzzed. There was a trade brewing with the Hitmen.
“He’s like, ‘Is there any reception?'” Allison recalled, laughing. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.'”
Whelen’s favorite part of the job is watching games.
The prospects are dreaming big. And so is Whelen, figuring out what their future will look like.
“It’s an inexact science,” he says.
As Whelen drives his Mitsubishi SUV rental to Seattle suburb Kent, he thinks back to how he landed with the Lightning. It was during the 2011 draft combine in Toronto, with Yzerman having just wrapped up his first full year as GM.
It was approximately 100 degrees in Toronto, which wasn’t good for Whelen, who walked over to the Westin in his suit (he wears a suit only for weddings, funerals, Lightning games and the draft). In Toronto, he met in a suite with Yzerman, Murray, assistant scouting director Darryl Plandowski and director of player development Steve Thomas, the former NHLer.
“You need a towel, buddy?” Thomas quipped.
“Actually, I do,” Whelen said.
Whelen’s straight talk is what drew him to Murray.
“We want decision-makers, not pointer dogs,” Murray says. “He’s got a voice.”
Whelen also has his own process.
Whelen takes his seat in the scout section of accesso ShoWare Center, and it’s a pretty good view, on the concourse level behind the home team’s net. There are three other scouts there, all in some sort of black workout attire. It’s fitting that Loverboy’s “Workin for the Weekend” is playing. Whelen nods over, then opens up his black spiral notebook. In there, he’s already written out the lineups for both teams, Portland and Seattle, highlighting in yellow the players he’s supposed to watch out for. The ones with asterisks are draft-eligible, the ones with dashes next to them he’s watching for trade possibilities.
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He’ll take small notes in the margins below — they’ll be the basis for the reports he files on Rinknet later that night. Whelen typically jots down the numbers of players who are used on the penalty kill and power play, which show they’ve got the coach’s trust. He’ll add “R” or “L” for right or left shot. He’ll put down a notable play, or if a guy got in a fight.
What is Whelen looking for?
“Skating, hockey sense, intelligence,” Whelen says. “When I first started, it was all about skating, skill, compete. Now the biggest thing is compete. If you don’t play hard, you’re not giving yourself a chance.”
Most NHL teams look for similar traits, but they just value them differently (more on that later). Whelen tries to follow the motto that Yzerman and current Lightning GM Julien BriseBois came up with: “Is he a Bolt?” They stress hockey sense, skill, competitiveness and character. Murray has said that Yzerman “opened up the world” to his scouting staff, partly due to his experience with the Russian Five, so a player’s nationality isn’t sticking point. Size has rarely been a factor. “Skating is something you can improve,” Whelen says. “If you’re not a smart hockey player, you can’t just pick it up.”
The last time Whelen saw Portland, they “laid an egg,” so he wasn’t too excited about this game. It’s important to see all these teams multiple times, in different parts of the season, so you don’t base your evaluation on one bad game. Whelen notices one draft-eligible defenseman is a more powerful skater than in the summer, which shows a growth mindset.
“You want to get looks at how a player does over time,” he says. “You like when they’re trending upwards. Those that level off usually stay that way or go down.”
On the game’s second goal, Whelen notices a defenseman not covering a Seattle player in front. Then he makes a bad pass up the middle. “You see there,” he says. “That’s hockey sense.”
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Whelen, now an assistant director of amateur scouting, has a territory of 60 teams, spanning the Ontario Hockey League, the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and the WHL. It’s only mid-November and he’s already seen more than a dozen WHL teams. He’ll rely on area scouts, like he used to be, for other insights. There are group texts with other scouts, and he speaks with Murray every other day, sometimes less often depending on travel. Murray is not much into group texts or video calls; he still holds regular conference calls with scouts.
“He’s old school,” Whelen says.
Whelen keeps an eye on skating — players’ mechanics, agility, speed. How good is a defenseman skating backward? There’s a player with a shortened stride, and he takes note. If the Lightning really like a player, but he’s got an issue skating, they’ll send clips to skating coach Barb Underhill, who has been a difference-maker for many players.
Underhill’s No. 1 case study was Point, who was an average skater coming out of junior in Moose Jaw. Whelen first scouted Point when he was 13 years old playing bantam AAA in Calgary. He was 5-feet-2, and those guys shouldn’t be able to compete, but “he was just as good.” When Whelen was doing work for Hockey Canada’s under-17 team, he offered advice to the coach. “The guy that will lead your team is Point,” he said. “That’s the guy you’re hanging your hat on.”
Point’s coach in Moose Jaw, Mike Stothers, recalled scouts being concerned about his lack of size or dynamic speed. Stothers would tell them, “Who has the puck all the time? Brayden Point. Didn’t matter if he was against big guys or little guys. Who scores big goals? Brayden Point.”
Whelen makes a ton of calls on players, asking their billet families about their grades, habits and friend group. He’ll call the players’ coaches and GMs, though he’s wary on how truthful they’ll be. Some will oversell their player and downgrade a player on another team.
“It’s a fine line of, what do you trust?” Whelen says.
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He trusts his eyes. And his gut.
Scouts also interview players. The interviews usually happen after practices or games, either at the rink or hotel. The Lightning, for example, have two types of questionaries that players go through, including one from team psychologist Ryan Hamilton. The questions vary from their hockey background, training and team dynamics to ethical questions.
“Tell me about a time you screwed up and how did you make it right?”
“Has someone ever wronged you, and how did you deal with it?”
“Are there acceptable things to keep from coaches and management?”
Whelen remembers doing Point’s interview after a Moose Jaw game that they lost. He worried it wouldn’t go well. Instead, Whelen was surprised when Point showed up in his hotel lobby and they talked for almost an hour.
“There are times when you do an interview where you get it done and it doesn’t matter what question you ask him, you know he’s a hockey player,” Whelen said. “And that was one of them. He was down to earth, didn’t let the loss affect him. There’s not a lot of those out there for sure.”
When Whelen arrives back at the Delta after the game, his work is far from over.
He’s not checking out the latest brewery in Everett or trying out karaoke at the Chinese restaurant/lounge down the street. Instead, Whelen hunkers down in his seventh-floor hotel suite, which boasts a full kitchen, a couch and a sizable desk.
It’s time for the least glamorous, but most challenging (and arguably most important), part of his job: writing his reports.
Whelen opens up his Microsoft Surface laptop and organizes his notes and spiral notebook on his right. He’ll log into Rinknet, a site that approximately 90 percent of teams use to compile and organize their scouting reports. Sometimes, Whelen will write up only three or four players. One time, he did 16. He probably spends six to eight hours a week on this program.
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On this day, Whelen is fueled by leftover pizza from the night before (sausage and pepperoni) and his go-to snack, Flaming Hot Ruffles chips. The job isn’t easy on the waistline, a reason why Whelen’s wife got him an Apple Watch, to make sure he’s staying active, even if that’s laps around an arena concourse.
“For guys saying, ‘It’d be great to be a scout, I love to go to the games,’ a lot of our job is this,” Whelen says. “Reports are the hardest things. Sometimes you’re writing up a guy 10 times. What more can you say? You need a degree in creative writing sometimes.”
These reports would make anyone’s personnel files look light. This is how teams build their draft lists, and every detail matters when you’re talking about hundreds of players. A draft-eligible player could have more than a dozen different reports filed on him.
Here’s the gist: There are several categories that get a number rating of one to five, with five being the best. Most teams rank size, strength, hockey sense, skating, competitiveness and character. There’s an offensive and defensive rating. There’s a game rating from the one the scout just watched.
There’s a projection: top-six forward, bottom-six or callup. These numbers correlate with a letter grade, from A-plus to F. The guys who are in the 4-5 range can be the rare A-plus players like Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel, maybe Shane Wright this year. A 4 is like an A or A-minus (a top-six player).
The name and size profile is there, then the chart with all the 1-to-5 rankings. Then there’s a synopsis of the game and a scouting report, which isn’t overly long but to the point. For example, here’s one of Whalen’s summaries of a defense prospect taken high in a draft the last five years, one who received a 4 rating:
“Played top four in both games, did see regular time on the power play and penalty kill. Was a guy handling the puck on the half boards, making things happen. The game is easy for him and he does not panic under pressure. He sees it at a different level than most. Still has some lapses, mostly in own end, but do see it as something that can be corrected. Skating is good, he took off a couple times in the game. Hockey sense and skills above average. He could see a spot on the World Junior team this Christmas. B-plus trade-for prospect.
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“You have to really sit down and project and think, ‘OK, is he really a 4? Or is he really a 3?” Whelen says.
These reports from all the different scouts are all combined, averaged, debated and then put on the team’s draft board. Most As go in the first-round category, with Bs in second, with the third to mid-to-late rounds in the C to C-minus range. The list includes all leagues, from the OHL to the QMJHL to WHL, plus a European list. Where the area scouts really make the biggest impact is deciphering the third round and beyond picks, such as Lightning picks Mathieu Joseph (fourth round) and Ondrej Palat (seventh round).
The group has a main list on Nov. 1, then Dec. 1, with another big discussion at the annual amateur scouting meetings, which this year were held in Tampa in early January. Whelen enjoys playing the devil’s advocate, trying to get others to believe more in their rankings and picks.
“One thing Al told me when I first started is that the key is, you have to be excited about your pick,” Whelen says. “It can’t be just, ‘Oh well, we’ll just take him.'”
The area scouts don’t get instant gratification or public praise. Whelen was an area scout out west his first several years with the Lightning, and in the first two drafts, none of his guys were taken. “My wife’s like, ‘What the heck are you doing? Are you even working?'” Whelen says, laughing.
But Whelen learned a valuable lesson from a scout he used to work with while with the Hitmen. This veteran scout got upset when none of his guys were picked for several years in the bantam draft. So he quit. The following year, a few players from the scout’s area were taken. In 2014, Whelen saw Point get drafted in the third round. Then came first-rounders Brett Howden (2016), Cal Foote (2017) and Nolan Foote (2019).
“It’s not one person picking Point,” Whelen says. “But the one person from that area has to like the guy or it gets kind of nixed. If I put him down too far on the list and he’s behind guys that don’t get picked, we never get a chance to pick him. You have to have him in the right spot to get selected.”
When the Lightning were on the verge of winning their second straight Stanley Cup last July, they invited all of their scouts to Tampa for the clinching game.
Whelen brought his 14-year-old son Brady for the trip of a lifetime.
Amid the chaos of the postgame celebration, Whelen approached Point outside the locker room. Point warmly greeted him, shook his hand and took a photo with Brady.
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“I didn’t see Brady for an hour, and he comes back showing me selfies with all the players,” Whelen says. “We were walking back to our hotel that night, and he said, ‘Hey dad, I’m going back,’ and I said, ‘No way, you’re coming to bed.’ He was glowing there for a long time.”
So was Whelen, who hasn’t yet gotten his name on the Cup but still feels part of it. He got a Cup Day in August, right after Point, bringing hockey’s holy grail to Devon. A line formed around the block at Dale Fisher Arena, with Whelen then having a private party at Marci’s Grill & Bar.
“I think half the town was there,” Whelen says.
When Whelen comes home, like after this mid-November Seattle-area trip, he tries to shoulder the load to help Allison, who is a business manager for Edmonton Public Schools. Whelen takes care of chores, like the laundry and garbage, and chauffeurs his sons around to their sports, driving one 35 minutes to volleyball and another to hockey 40 minutes the other way. There’s usually one quiet month a year for scouts, from early August to early September, so Whelen hooks a trailer to his Ford truck and goes up to the lake for boating and water skiing. He loves to hunt moose and deer when he has the chance.
“The job is not forgiving for that,” Whelen says. “It’s not like I’m off in November.”
Because of the pandemic, Whelen was unable to travel last season, spending most of his time in his basement, which featured an L-shaped desk, a couch and flat-screen TVs. On the wall are two signed Point jerseys. Whelen’s youngest son, Riley, might be on track to follow in the family scouting business, surprising his parents by being able to recite every goalie and backup goalie in the NHL. Allison laughs recalling how her husband will “scout” other kids that their son plays with and against, and his reports make it back to the dinner table.
“He’s like, ‘Don’t tell anyone,'” Allison says. “Who do I know?”
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Whelen interviewed for the Panthers director of amateur scouting position last year but didn’t get it — “I’m not ready yet,” he said. He’s more than content to continue to learn the ropes from Murray, hoping to find the next Point or Palat.
“He’s the happiest person on the planet now that he’s got to watch hockey live again,” Allison says. “If he had an 8-to-5 job, I don’t think he would do it.
“This is him.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: Rich Lam, Bruce Bennett, Andy Devlin / Getty Images)