Pro scouts aren’t effusive by nature.
They are paid to pick holes in opponents in the offing, to identify the weak spots that can be capitalized on. Especially players making their first or second run through the league, those who are less known or rather unknown quantities.
That said, the pro scouts still have to file reports on Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews, the No. 1 picks in the last two NHL drafts and, as such, the physical embodiment of hope for escape from malaise in Edmonton and Toronto respectively.
McDavid’s Oilers are coming to his hometown to face Matthews’ Maple Leafs Tuesday night. Edmonton has been on an early roll and McDavid has been among the league-leading scorers.
Matthews sent Torontonians into some sort of delirium with his four goals in his NHL debut against Ottawa and it hasn’t really subsided despite his team’s ups-and-more-often-downs recently.
OK, pro scouts try to avoid the standard enthusiasms of fans and succeed 99 per cent of the time, but as three in the fraternity admitted in not-for-attribution interviews, they sometimes fail when either of these two players are on the ice.
“You try to focus and track everybody on the ice, other players out there, but you sometimes get caught up just watching them,” a Western Conference scout said.
Coming into the 2016-17 season, you’d expect pro scouts to talk in terms like this about McDavid—even though he missed a big chunk of his rookie season with the Oil he made impressions that were remarkable and indelible.
Often after a goal or an exceptional play, you were left asking: How did he do that? The aforementioned Western Conference pro scout (let’s call him Scout 1) said that a couple of themes run through many of those highlight-reel moments.
“Everyone talks about his skating and speed,” Scout 1 said. “That’s the base of it, the fact that he has speed that defencemen just don’t see on a regular basis. But what makes him so dangerous is that his puck skills and decision-making keep up, even at top speed—his hands and stick are going as fast as he is.
“And even in fifth gear he processes the game—he sees the ice, reads the play, has awareness of where his linemates are, what the goalies is doing. And it’s only trending up—I said all this about him a year ago and it’s not just that nobody has figured him out or caught up to him. I think he’s actually stronger on the puck and faster than a year ago and that you can project him to even be better, barring injury.”
As much as any teenager can be a known quantity arriving in the NHL, McDavid was billed as a generational player (whatever that means) a year ago and he’s done nothing but live up to the hype. From his time in Erie and with the world junior team, we have basically watched him grow up.
Matthews, however, is a contrast. Yes, we saw him at a couple of world juniors but then he spent his draft year in Switzerland, where he had nothing like the attention focused on McDavid in the run-up to the 2015 draft.
The American is still making first impressions with NHL pro scouts and as one (let’s call him Scout 2) cautioned, it’s a dicey exercise “reading too much into any player based on a few viewings, especially on his first time through the league.”
Though Scout 2 said this in one breath, he did offer up this preliminary take on Matthews: “The foundation to his game is there,” he said. “He can handle the puck at pace and he’s heavy on the puck for such a young player. What stands out for me, the intriguing part, is his ability to read defencemen’s play—whether it’s instincts or anticipation, however you want to label it.
“He has a sense of where to go without the puck. He makes plays that aren’t the obvious play, the usual play almost everybody makes. He can force a turnover simply by doing stuff even really good defencemen don’t expect. I’d point to that first game in Ottawa—he stripped the puck off [Erik] Karlsson and went by him when most guys would just have put a body on him and stayed on the boards. It was really a surgical play—and that’s just his first game.”
The conventional wisdom coming into McDavid’s first NHL game at the ACC is that he has separated himself from the other teenage phenoms, Matthews and Jack Eichel, who’s on the sidelines with a high-ankle sprain down the road in Buffalo.
As the conventional wisdom goes, it’s just a matter of McDavid being able to do what the others can but faster. A veteran scout with an Eastern Conference team (yes, Scout 3) said he thought “comparisons aren’t fair [because they’re] all different players.”
Saying that, however, Scout 3 thought that skating might be the aspect of Matthews’ game that will evolve in seasons to come.
“He doesn’t have the change of pace or the explosiveness that McDavid does, but he probably compares pretty favourably with Eichel as a skater,” Scout 3 said. “Again, this is on limited views but I haven’t seen him lose chases for the puck.
“Mechanically he’s a good skater, nothing mechanically wrong there—[skating’s] a plus for him and it’s going to get better like it does for other young players as he fills out and puts in the work to get stronger.”
But to Scout 1 for a summation: “It’s interesting to watch the body language. McDavid is a kid who wears his heart on his sleeve—not that he acts out or anything like that, but you know when he’s bugged.
“Matthews so far seems like he keeps it under wraps … plays hard, really competes but just gives you no read of what’s going on, which even a lot of veterans don’t manage to do. [That’s] probably good for him—he’s going to have some bumps along the way and that’s how he’ll deal with them the best.”
