Scout’s Take: Halifax Mooseheads winger Maxime Fortier

The second toughest task for a NHL scout is finding talent. Every player is a win, some bigger than others. We all know that.

The toughest task is one that a scout rarely takes on, and even when he does it’s with great reluctance and half a heart: challenging the conventional wisdom. Said one veteran scout this week: “Guys want to repeat what worked for them before. They don’t want to be the ones to go out on the limb or think out of the box.”

This came up in discussion about the Halifax Mooseheads’ Max Fortier, a kid who has just broken out in goals and assists like hives, a league leading 44 points in 24 games. (That six of them came in a 11-10 loss to Acadie-Bathurst only devalues it lightly.)

“There have been other guys who tore up major junior, especially the Q, who were thought of as just good juniors and when given a shot in the pros the holes in their game showed up,” the scout said. “It’s usually an undersized forward, a guy who you’d say isn’t a plus or plus-plus skater. A guy who won’t be able to get separation at the next level. We’ve seen that all before.”

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To some extent that’s true. That was the book on a lot of guys who tried and died, e.g. Corey Locke, the 2003 CHL Player of the Year, who went in the fourth round to Montreal and got into nine games with three NHL teams before lighting out to Europe. That was also the book on a lot of guys who were doubted but stuck, e.g. Mike Ribeiro, who scored 167 points in his draft season in the QMJHL and was a bit of a hometown pick by the Canadiens at No. 45 overall. (A lot of people will knock Ribeiro but he logged more than 1,000 career games, four times as many as Rico Fata, a similarly sized speedster who went fifth overall in that same draft and was a career enigma.)

Which brings us tortuously back to Fortier. A late-97 birthday, he was ranked No. 145 among North American skaters per NHL Central Scouting Service at the end of last season and went undrafted despite a 31-goal, 77-point regular season. He started last season as a ‘C’ prospect, NHL CSS’s designation for a possible pick from the fourth to sixth rounds. He’s again a ‘C’ on the CSS watch list. If he were three inches taller than his listed 5-feet-10 and and 25 pounds heavier than his listed 175, he’d have been no worse than a middle-round pick last June.

Tyler Johnson scored 115 points fis final season of junior with the Spokane Chiefs. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

At what point does your success outweigh the fact that you don’t conform to the profile that scouts are looking for, namely other prospects whose success the scouting department dines out on? If Fortier isn’t yet at that point, he’s getting close to it. “Somebody has to give him a look. Scouts haven’t changed as fast as the game did. The league changed coming out of the lockout, but a lot of guys are still looking at players the same way that they did in 20 years ago,” said and NHL scouting director.

“[And it’s] really true of players who passed through the draft once or twice… no one wanted to bother with them before. I think everyone is getting more open-minded about it. It was easy to say, ‘No one liked him before and nothing has changed.’ Everyone bought into the idea that no one ever gets missed. Now everyone wants to find the next Tyler Johnson.”

Tampa’s Johnson is the extreme case: He not only didn’t get drafted, but CSS didn’t even list him as a C prospect.

It’s a pretty good time to be a player in Fortier’s situation and not simply because teams are giving more and more thought to players who have been undrafted 19-year-olds and overagers. Now, you have to suppose that the Vegas Golden Knights are going to have to be pretty aggressive in trying to stock their AHL roster—while other teams fill the affiliate lineup with their graduating juniors, first- second- and third-year pros, the Knights are going to have to scramble.

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Injuries and the draft
One scout this weekend noted that the must-see game this season will be projected No. 1 Nolan Patrick’s first back after an abdominal injury that has kept him out of the Brandon Wheat Kings lineup since the second week of October. Patrick has been in only six games this season and he’s listed as two weeks away from a return (although the timeline has been rewritten a couple of times so far).

What impact will the injury play on Patrick’s draft stock? Scouts figure it will be minimal.

Said one whose team might wind up in the lottery mix: “There’d probably be more questions if he was a ’99 birthday, but the fact is he’s a late birthday so he’s already had two full years in the league. There’s a clear idea of what he is as a player. Still everyone is going to want to see him and make sure [the injury] isn’t having any sort of lasting effect. The [WHL region scouts] are going to take out leases on apartments in Brandon.”

That’s not to say that injuries never loom large in the upper echelon of the draft. “The one year that injuries had a big impact was the Nail Yakupov draft. Both [Alex] Galchenyuk and [Morgan] Rielly probably went later than they would have because of limited views—our pre-season list, we were looking at Galchenyuk at No. 1. [He went No. 3 to Montreal.] Galchenyuk wasn’t a late birthday, so you didn’t have the same amount of viewing that Patrick had.

“Rielly was the top defenceman on that list based on the previous season, but again, he dropped behind [Columbus’ Ryan] Murray and [Griffin] Reinhart on some teams’ lists. Same story—not a late birthday, just one season to base your evaluations on. They’re sort of fixed values in your mind—hard to project improvement that players have when they’re going through the league in their second seasons.”