ST. PAUL, Minn. — Mark Kelley was half a world away doing what he’s often doing — watching a hockey tournament — when he took the phone call that helped shape the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup championship season.
The year was 2007 and Kelley, then an amateur scout for the Hawks and now their director of amateur scouting, was at a rink in St. Petersburg, Russia, evaluating talent when Stan Bowman phoned with the news the team had won the NHL draft lottery.
“I knew exactly what time it was in North America when I answered the phone,” Kelley, 52, recalled. “This was still in April, two months before the draft, but we knew we were taking Patrick Kane.”
Their top pick won’t be as clear-cut when Kelley and the rest of the Hawks’ hierarchy hit the floor of Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., for the 2011 NHL Entry Draft that begins with Friday’s first round and continues with Rounds 2-7 Saturday.
Barring a trade, the Hawks will use their first pick — 18th overall — on a player who likely won’t provide the kind of sudden impact Kane did when he entered the NHL a few months after being the top pick and ended his third season scoring in overtime against the Flyers in Game 6 of the 2010 Stanley Cup finals to give the organization its first championship in 49 years.
“When you’re picking in the Top 5 like we did with Kane and (Jonathan) Toews (third overall in ’06) the expectation is they’re more advanced and they can come in and help sooner,” said Kelley, who manages a staff of eight full- and three part-time scouts in North America and another three full-timers in Europe. “As a team we need depth help but we don’t specifically need the players we’re drafting to step right in. We can be a little bit more patient with their development.”
The ’11 draft will be Kelley’s fourth as the Hawks’ scouting director. It was a long road for the Waterville, Maine, native to become the man entrusted with developing the future of the Hawks.
A four-year hockey player at Colby College, Kelley’s first NHL job was as a scout with the Nordiques in 1989. A later stint with the Penguins organization included scouting in Europe and working as assistant general manager with Russia’s Red Army team. He lived in Europe for six years, including two in Moscow. In 2006, Kelley landed with the Hawks as a scout.
“I have to keep feeding the machine,” he said. “To do that we have to have prospects coming in a timely basis. If they’re all coming in the same year it doesn’t work because we don’t have that many opportunities. Whether it’s Rockford (of the American Hockey League) or eventually in Chicago, for it to work right we have to have it going on a schedule.”
Kelley and his staff rate close to 250 players throughout the year and pare that list down to around 100 for the draft. Additional amateur players are broken into regional lists for Western Canada, the Quebec region and United States high schoolers.
“We’ve had extensive scouting of all different regions and we have our staff working hard first to identify all the top players and then honing in on those players,” Bowman said. “They’ve done their background talking to them and getting to know them as people. Even though there haven’t been many games played in the last month or two there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve been working hard at that.”
The result will be on display in a draft Kelley believes has a lot of depth.
“It’s deep probably into the third round,” he said. ‘What makes this draft unique is we have a tier of six players and then there’s another tier of six players and then we’re looking at a tier of players that might be 20 or 25. In that 20-25 you separate it by 20 names but there’s not that much separation between the players.”
Barring trades, which Kelley said is certainly a possibility, the Hawks have 10 selections. in addition to No. 18, they hold the 36th and 43rd picks and have a total of five within the first 79.
“One of the things with the Blackhawks is we know who our core group is,” Kelley said. “The core is going to be there for quite awhile and (coach Joel Quenneville) is going to be there for a while.
“We have to get players who can play with our core and have to be players who can play Joel’s system. Joel wants smart players. He likes players who can skate and character is a huge thing.”
Twitter @ChrisKuc
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