Take Ten with Ross Mahoney

Posted on June 19, 2012

Ross Mahoney has served as the Capitals' director of amateur scouting for about a decade and a half now, and I've been privileged to benefit greatly from his draft and hockey wisdom during that span, especially around this time every year. He keeps things close to the vest before the draft, and I we know that, so I don't ask player-specific questions. I recently conducted this year's pre-draft Q and A with Ross, and here are the results. What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of this draft as a whole? “I think I would say that early in the draft it seems like it’s fairly strong. But I don’t know if there’s a lot of separation. It won’t surprise me if some needs get picked out in the first round. I’m sure a lot of the names might be the same but I’m not so sure what the order would be for different teams. Because in some years there has been more separation, where maybe here are the top two guys, and then the next group of seven or eight and another group of eight. This year there seems to be a lot of parity, actually.” How would you characterize the depth of this year’s draft in rounds 3-7 as compared to previous drafts you’ve been involved with? “It looks to me to be an average draft in that way. It’s hard. We have to wait until they’re 24, 25 years old. Looking through the list though, it seems to be pretty average that way.” Does the fact that many of the high profile players were injured mean than there are opportunities there for teams whose scouts had a good handle on these guys before their draft year rolled around? “I think that would definitely be an advantage to the teams that spend more time watching the 16-year-olds than maybe other teams do. You might have to rely sometimes on your area people, too. If you have a real good feeling about one of those players who were hurt in the draft year but your area guy had seen them play a lot earlier in the year, which in our case, we’ve been good as far as that goes.” Why are there fewer skilled Canadian forwards this time around? “I don’t know. It’s a good question, I guess. Maybe it’s because there have been a lot of skilled defensemen that have been involved in these drafts lately as far as Canadians go. I don’t really have an answer for that. I don’t know if there is something to that or not.” How is your approach or your mindset different in a year in which you have two first-rounders vs. a year in which you didn’t have a pick until the fourth round? “Going into it, it’s the same. We didn’t make that trade [for Troy Brouwer in 2011] until shortly before the draft started last year. You never know. During the draft, you could make a trade and end up acquiring picks. So you have to be ready for anything. We have our meetings and make our lists and get ready to go to the draft. Whatever happens, happens whether we’re trading away picks or acquiring picks. I think you always want to be prepared for everything. You never want to be surprised by anything. We try make sure we’re not surprised and whether we trade picks or acquire picks we approach it the same, as if we had picks in every round.” What sort of thinking went into whether or not to take that second rounder from the Avs this year or next? “You look at it and try to determine what the pick might be next year. And when you’re doing that, you don’t know what’s going to take place as far as Colorado and what type of year they’re going to have. So in a way, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. We looked at it and said, ‘We’ve got the pick, a second-round pick, so let’s use it this year.’ It’s a good draft and we can also use it to acquire something else if we had to. You can look at it in both ways in the sense that it’s a good pick, it’s a second-round pick. We like a lot of the players that are available. It also gives you a little more ammunition to make a trade if you wanted to.” What sort of exercises do you go through to try and gauge what will happen with picks 1-10 and 12-15 to determine whether you’ll be able to get the guys you like at 11 and 16? “Sometimes you have a feel for some teams and what their drafting has been like in recent years. There may be trends you can look at which might give you an idea of who they might be taking. Sometimes teams do draft for need and you take a look at what they’ve done in the past number of years and maybe identify their needs and see what players are available that might fit, whether it’s a goaltender, defenseman or forward. That’s all part of coming up with mock drafts, trying to interpret what these other teams are looking for and what they might do. Hopefully, it gives you and idea of who might be available in the immediate area of where you’re picking. Obviously, you’re not a part of those teams so you don’t know exactly what they’re thinking. You do it to give yourself an idea of what might be there, which would help you as far as trading up or trading back, that sort of thing.” How would you say you and your staff have grown and evolved in the decade and a half you’ve been doing this? “We have had some changes to our staff. We’ve had some people rotate in and rotate out. But there are three or four of us who have been here from almost the beginning and I think that anytime you have experience as a group it’s valuable and I think that has continued to help us. You know what each other is thinking and you know how each other operates and I know what the guys mean when they’re talking about players. I think that’s been a big part of it. We’ve had a fairly constant situation with three or four members of the group. I just think that experience as a group really makes a difference. It really makes you better.” It’s been 16 years since as many as 13 defensemen were chosen in the first round. Can you see that changing this year? “It’s a possibility. It will depend on what these other teams are looking at. But I definitely think there is going to be a high number of defensemen taken. But in the first round there are good players at all positions. There do seem to be more defensemen that could go in that top 30.” Do you find that defensemen and goaltenders drafted in the first round or two have higher bust rates than forwards chosen in the same range? “That’s a good question. It’s interesting how sometimes if a goaltender doesn’t make it, it seems to be a bit of a bust pick. But I don’t understand the difference if a defenseman or a forward doesn’t make it. All three of them didn’t make it, but it seems to be worse if it was a goalie that didn’t make it. And I don’t know why that is. But if you read from the publications afterwards, they’ll talk a lot about the goalie who didn’t make it in the first round but they don’t talk as much about the forward that didn’t make it. With defensemen, it takes a long time to be a good defenseman in the NHL. The goalie is the last [line of defense]; they pull the puck out of the net. With defensemen, your mistakes are usually more evident than with forwards. I think sometimes with defensemen, it just takes a while to become a good NHL defensemen. We need to give them a couple more years after the draft than the forwards to see if it was good or bad.”