Kings' draft guru shares philosophy
/Kings vice president of hockey operations and player personnel Michael Futa was a guest on Sportsnet 590 The FAN Wednesday morning.
On drafting:
"You try to get as much information as you can, and throw it in the blender and hope you can come up as close to what the player is going to be project to be as possible and make your selection."
On how much size is discussed when drafting junior players:
"I think you can have a smaller player. There's a lot of great smaller players. Like, I mean, Patrick Kane is an incredible player... Marty St. Louis, some of the smaller players coming up. You can't have a whole team of smaller players and I think that's something we've discussed as our identity is to have a big, strong, fast team that can grind you down and wear you down in a long series.
"Sometimes it's not very pretty to watch during the regular season, but I think you could add a couple of small players to that mix you could get away with it. I don't think it's possible to have a whole team of smaller players. I just think in the long run you're going to get worn down. Again, the way we built our team is you can insert one or two - we've got a small player playing in Manchester, Jordan Weal, who's clearly ready for the National Hockey League. You know, he's a 5-9 hockey player. It's a tough lineup to make, but as I said, I don't think - particularly with the makeup of the San Joses and Anaheims and now you see the Minneostas and St. Louis - you don't want to have a small team or you'll just get pushed off the ice."
On the importance of the meeting with a junior player before the draft:
"It's huge, Jer. I'll use again the example of Tyler Toffoli. I mean, I had friends... guys that had coached this guy when he was just a little kid. I mean, they talked about this kid and all of the sudden you see him in minor midget and he moves up the ladder and now he's a young guy and you meet the family and the dad's basically the manager of every team he's on. It's not a team that's loaded with cash and just supported their son all the way through. And everything we talked to him about and challenged him on as a kid, he's met the challenge.
"I mean, at first he was going to be too slow and then you challenge him on his fitness and he did every bit of work possible. And now they look at him talking about him like he's a fast NHL player. And all the natural instincts that he had filling the net as a young kid, he's able to do that at the next level.
"So it's huge. It's absolutely huge."
Futa then further demonstrated his point.
"It comes down to it, it gets back to that analogy. When you're in a gym, if you've got a kid - to be in the NHL, you do the work when nobody's watching. Like, there's a lot of guys in junior - the work that Kopi, Dustin Brown and these guys put in, to be able to travel and play at the level they do - they do it when nobody's watching. The guy's that don't make it do the reps and then when the coach turns their eye, they cheat. And it happens. And it happens still. You try to tell them, gee, I didn't do everything I needed to do to play in the NHL. I found another route to get there. But there's kids now that clearly don't get it and they still want to cheat and they usually end up leading their beer league in scoring and telling everybody that they got screwed."
Source: Sportsnet 590 The FAN