‘It’s about selling the long-term plan’: How the Canucks get NCAA prospects signed (2024)

BOSTON, Mass. – It was April of 2016 and Canucks general manager Jim Benning was in the stands at Amalie Arena in Tampa Bay, Florida, watching as Boston College, led by goaltender Thatcher Demko, dropped a Frozen Four elimination game 3-2 to Quinnipiac.

On the other corner of the continent, the result was monitored closely. Demko was widely seen as Vancouver’s top prospect. A second-round draft pick, Demko had shattered several Boston College records held by Cory Schneider, a goalie whose name resonates in Vancouver. He’d won the Mike Richter Award as the best collegiate goaltender in the nation.

And having accelerated through his final year of high school to begin his college career a year early, Demko’s junior year of college was now finished.

In one of the NHL’s most intensely scrutinous market, the path that another high-profile NCAA player, Jimmy Vesey, had taken that year – leaving school before graduation to become a free agent on Aug. 15 and spurning the Nashville Predators, the team that drafted him – loomed over everything Demko-related.

In the current NHL/NHLPA CBA exists article 8.6(c), which states that a player drafted by an NHL team playing in the NCAA can withdraw from school following the conclusion of their senior season, but before graduation and become a free agent the following Aug. 15. It’s a path that players like Vesey and Kevin Hayes have taken over the past decade.

For teams eager to avoid such a fate with their own drafted collegiate players, the ideal scenario is to sign your top college prospects following their junior season (or even earlier, if the player is ready). The closer a player gets to their senior season and the 8.6(c) route, the thinking goes, the more a club’s leverage to sign that player diminishes.

Having missed the playoffs for the first time in Benning’s managerial tenure and drawing criticism locally for not trading Dan Hamhuis and Radim Vrbata for futures at the 2016 trade deadline, the pressure on Canucks management was mounting. Somehow that pressure congealed around a professional decision that a head-strong goaltending prospect, furious about losing a shot at a National Championship in a hard-fought semifinal game, was working through with his family, his advisor and his college teammates.

And in this situation, Benning made an essential decision. He backed off.

“He’s such a competitive guy,” Benning said with a laugh as he recalled this episode on Monday evening during the second intermission of a Beanpot semifinal game between Harvard and Northeastern at TD Garden.

“When we go to watch these tournaments, we don’t necessarily know if our player is going to come out,” Benning continued. “We’re there to meet with the player, support them and get to know them better.

“With Demko, he ended up coming out and we signed him. It’s about selling the long-term plan so that they see that at some point, they’ll be an NHL player. That’s what it’s about. That’s what we try to do.”

In Demko’s case, Benning’s restrained approach paid off.

“I remember Jim called me, and I appreciated the route he took,” Demko recalled last week in a conversation with The Athletic. “He called and told me to take my time with the decision. He knows I’m a pretty competitive guy and I was pissed that we came up short, it hurt pretty bad.

“So he gave me some space, a few days. I thought it was the right time to sign, but with that loss fresh in my mind, there was part of me that wanted to come back and give it another crack.”

The decision to leave college is a complicated one for players. In Demko’s case, he met with some of his fellow teammates, lots of them big-time NHL prospects, following their loss to Quinnipiac. They all decided together that it was time to progress as professionals, rather than return to chase a National Championship.

Even so, when Demko did sign with the Canucks nearly two weeks after the Quinnipiac loss, he signed an extraordinary entry-level contract, a deal that included potential performance bonuses well above and beyond what you commonly see given to a second-round draft pick. It’s an illustration of the unique leverage a talented college prospect can possess.

Scouting, developing and ultimately signing NCAA players has been a priority for the Canucks for well over a decade now, but the club’s focus on mining the college ranks has seemed to accelerate over the past several seasons. According to Benning, it goes beyond Vancouver and has become part of a larger leaguewide trend.

“You see more and more teams around the league prioritize college hockey,” Benning said. “Ten or 12 years ago you only had a few teams with specific scouts that covered college hockey, and now I think every team has specific college scouts who watch the games and know the players.”

While teams around the NHL are making sure to have more scouting eyes on the college game, it should still be noted that there aren’t many clubs that have done as well at identifying and developing talent out of the NCAA ranks as Vancouver has in recent seasons. The current Pacific Division-leading Canucks have been prominently built around some key young players that went through college hockey, including Demko, Quinn Hughes, Brock Boeser, Troy Stecher and Adam Gaudette.

The Athletic Vancouver built a data set that includes all players signed out of the college ranks since 2014; both drafted players and undrafted free agents. For a player to qualify as an NCAA find for an organization for this exercise, the player had to be signed out of the college ranks directly or acquired in a trade before playing professionally. (In other words, the Arizona Coyotes don’t get credit for pulling Nick Schmaltz out of college, since he’d already played 174 games of professional hockey with the Chicago Blackhawks organization. Boston Bruins forward Sean Kuraly, on the other hand, is considered to be a Bruins find out of college in this data set even though he was a 2011 San Jose Sharks draft pick, since Boston traded for him (and signed him) prior to his establishing himself as a professional player.

Among all NHL teams this season, only the Pittsburgh Penguins – led by Bryan Rust and Jake Guentzel – have netted more point production than Vancouver has this season from NCAA players signed since 2014:

This ranking is intended to provide a snapshot of teams that are getting contributions this season from college players signed over the course of a five-year window (or since the Canucks’ management change in 2014). It isn’t meant to be a holistic or definitive ranking of a team’s effectiveness scouting the college ranks.

As an example, while the Canucks’ cohort of NCAA players signed since 2014 may have outscored Winnipeg’s, it should be noted that among those six Jets players is goaltender Connor Hellebuyck – who has been as valuable as anyone in the sport this season.

Even so, the snapshot does reveal that the Benning regime has been relatively successful at identifying talented college players and then getting them signed, a level of success that could expand further in years to come with players in the pipeline like Utica Comets star rookie Brogan Rafferty, Northeastern centreman Tyler Madden and Harvard defender Jack Rathbone.

Rafferty is already signed to a deal that extends through next season, but Madden and Rathbone have decisions to make in the next year or two. They’re the next front in Vancouver’s effort to appeal to talented college players, to get players who grew up rooting for the Bruins and the Blackhawks to begin to identify as “Canucks.”
“It starts out when we draft them, you develop that relationship with them,” Benning said of the club’s straightforward approach to building rapport with college players. “We bring them into development camp with all of our other young players, they meet our other young players and form friendships. Then we start working with them. This year we have Chris Higgins working with Ryan Johnson, watching our prospects, helping them develop and working on a long-term relationship between the player and the organization. We’re in constant communication with them so that when they decide to come out, they want to sign with us and be part of our team.”

For players, meanwhile, the calculus on when to “go pro” can be complicated. Demko grappled with the decision to leave college because he still harboured unfulfilled goals at the NCAA level. He still wanted to be a national champion.

In Stecher’s case, when he was deciding on which team to sign with as a highly recruited undrafted free agent, it was Vancouver’s honesty and the quality of their minor league coaching that edged them into the lead – in addition to his local ties.

“With management, sometimes you don’t want them to sugarcoat everything, you want them to tell you you need to improve in this area or you’ll be exposed at the NHL level,” Stecher said last week, recalling his recruitment process. “I really took that to heart. Some teams were telling me, “you’re the next Bobby Orr.” And I know I had a good year in college but I also know I’m not Bobby Orr by any means. It’s a compliment, but you see through it.

“So for me, it was looking at depth charts, prospects in the organization. I had a relationship with Travis Green, from when he drafted me in Portland. I’d heard good things about him and they were doing good things in Utica, so I knew if I wasn’t going to make it in Vancouver out of camp, I’d have good coaching, which I felt I’d need to get to the next level.”

Another key element is a player’s preparedness to play at the next level. Typically, player representatives only advise their clients to leave college early if it’s become obvious that they’re too good for that level.

“The first thing to evaluate is whether the player is ready to leave college or not,” player agent Lewis Gross explained, who represents NCAA alums like Torey Krug and Johnny Gaudreau. “Because if a player isn’t dominating in college he may not be ready to play in the AHL, much less in the NHL.”

And of course, there’s the matter of opportunity, of a clear pathway to the NHL.

“Often we hold a meeting once the player has decided to sign – either at my office or over Skype,” Gross said, describing the process he takes his undrafted free agent clients through when they’re making these decisions “And we go through depth charts and see what players at the same position each team has and when those contracts expire. It’s about ensuring your clients are making informed decisions with the best information possible, in regards to the opportunity teams offer.”

The opportunity side of the equation is worth noting and monitoring from a Canucks perspective. Over the past five years, the Canucks have been able to offer NHL-level opportunities to college players in abundance, the product of a weak roster in the process of a rebuild.

The club was able to offer Gaudette, Boeser and Hughes – and even players like Rafferty and Josh Teves – an opportunity to play NHL games right away, burning a year off of their entry-level deals. That’s an edge that’s harder to execute for an organization icing a competitive team in the middle of a playoff push. Opportunity also tends to dry up as the quality of a team increases and the NHL roster becomes more difficult to crack.

Canucks management and coaches watched two of Vancouver’s next wave of NCAA prospects, Rathbone and Madden, play in a hard-fought Beanpot contest on Monday night at TD Garden in Boston. Both Rathbone and Madden are facing significant decisions following their respective seasons.

On Monday night, Rathbone’s speed and offensive instincts were readily apparent in a losing effort. He’s already a strong enough skater that his speed will translate against NHL competition, though one collegiate scout on Monday suggested that the Harvard blueliner will need to fine-tune his hockey IQ to handle the savviness and pressure of NHL-level forecheckers. Madden looked dynamic at times and his line threatened throughout the evening, but the skilled, hard-nosed centreman is still slight of frame at only 150 pounds and didn’t have his best game.

Still, in terms of their NHL-ready tools, skill level and athleticism, both Rathbone and Madden looked ready for the rigours of professional hockey. It still won’t be a straightforward decision for either player though. It never is.

“I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say the interest was there,” Rathbone saidlast week during a brief telephone conversation. “Everyone wants to play in the NHL someday, but I haven’t had those conversations yet with my family or my advisor. I’m just focused on the next stretch of games here, they’re really important in setting us up for a big playoff run.”

“It’s going to be a tough one,” Madden said. “We’ll see at the end of this year or next year what happens. I don’t know myself, but it’s hard. Every day I try to focus on the day ahead of me and the next game and that’s it, but obviously, I’ve had to talk to my advisor and think about some things that might happen down the road. I try to keep it in the back of my mind and know that I’m working toward it, but still play every single game as hard as I can and not be waiting for time to run out.”

Publicly the Canucks will be patient, even as Rathbone has a status quirk that gives him the ability to potentially become a free agent a year earlier than what 8.6(c) normally prescribes.

“We’ll continue to follow, watch and support them,” Benning said of his club’s intentions on signing Madden and Rathbone. “They still have some years after this, so when they let us know what their intentions are, we’ll act upon that.”

And why not be patient? There’s no reason to deviate from a process that’s worked this well for the club in recent seasons.

(Top photo: Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images)