Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
The odds improve dramatically when you're actually scouting Europe properly and other teams aren't.
Since the first days of professional hockey, there have been teams that went cheap on scouting to pay players more, and teams that went cheap on players to do more scouting. The latter always outperform the former in the long run.
In the big salary inflation of the 1990s, a lot of smaller-market teams cut back their scouting and development budgets and spent that money trying to keep up with escalating player salaries. The Flames were one of those teams. By the time of the lockout, they had only a handful of scouts and only a shared AHL team. Any team that prioritized scouting and development had an easy advantage in that environment.
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And there's no cap on scouting, any serious NHL team present day should be putting millions into scouting every year, imo.