It’s no secret that the Ontario Hockey League’s Soo Greyhounds have become a team built primarily through the OHL Priority Selection.
A quick look down the Greyhounds current 25-man roster shows just four players who weren’t drafted by the team or, in the case of Tanner Dickinson, signed as a free agent.
Draft success has been the key to on-ice success and for general manager Kyle Raftis and the Greyhounds scouting staff, the 2022 draft is no different.
The annual event is set to kick off this evening with rounds one through three before holding the remain 12 rounds on Saturday, beginning at 9 a.m.
“There’s good depth to it in the first couple of rounds,” Raftis said of this year’s draft. “There’s going to be a lot of variation in terms of direction that teams are going to go. You might see some picks that look off the board, but there’s a lot of good players and I don’t think there’s a ton of separation.”
“It’s a good draft for sure,” Raftis added. “There’s obviously some high end players at the top of it, but at the same time, there’s good depth too and I don’t think it drops off for a few rounds.”
With draft day upon them, Raftis said the final days leading up to it have meant tinkering as opposed to making major changes to their draft list.
“The last couple of weeks have been interviews more so with players and discussions on that side of it,” Raftis said, adding that team scouts traveled into the Sault on Wednesday.
“We had meetings all day Thursday just to go over stuff and tinker with the lists, not that there is a huge amount of movement with it,” Raftis added. “Now that we picked up a second, where our picks are lying, we talk about some scenarios.”
That second round pick came by way of a trade with the Ottawa 67’s on Thursday. The Greyhounds added the pick, which originally belonged to the Windsor Spitfires, in exchange for a second round pick in 2025 and a third round pick, originally Ottawa’s, in 2024.
“The way our list was coming together, if we could get four shots on Friday night in those first three rounds, it could really set us up moving forward,” Raftis said. “In a perfect world, you would love to be able to make that trade depending on who is on the board, but we were just comfortable enough with the groupings of players that were going to be there that we thought it was good to have that extra shot at them.”
Raftis added that selecting by position, specifically early on in the draft, only comes into play depending on player availability.
“If you’re making a pick in a certain spot and it’s a centre versus a defenceman and there’s a group of centres that we really like in that spot or there’s a defenceman and it drops off after him, that’s sometimes a sport where we take the defenceman,” Raftis said.
From a local standpoint, Soo Jr. Greyhounds coach Jamie Henderson expects there to be some local content by the time the two-day event wraps up and one player that has garnered interest is goaltender Charlie Burns.
“The thing about Charlie is he’s all-in to be a hockey player,” Henderson said of the 16-year-old. “His commitment, his focus, and his desire is right there at the level it needs to be to be an OHL goaltender. There are some things in his game that he needs to improve, and he recognizes that, as with almost every goalie in the draft.”
“The thing that’s going to endear him to whatever team drafts him is they’re getting a kid who is really focused on being a hockey player,” Henderson added. “He’s a really fun guy to be around. He’s really motivated. Whoever picks him is going to be really happy in a couple of years. He’s going to need some time develop, like all goalies, but you talk about somebody who’s committed to being a hockey player, Charlie’s your guy.”
Speaking on the 2006 age group as a whole, Henderson said making the jump to the Great North Under-18 League wasn’t an easy one.
“It was a group that we didn’t really know too much about,” Henderson said. “We had some guys that had to get their feet wet at U18. It’s not easy for them to play in an older league against older players. For a vast majority of our players, just the ability to play in a physical league like the Great North League, it took some time for that to happen and just to be able to figure out what they needed to do to be able to handle the physicality. For a few of them, that’s still the challenge playing against older players is how to really look as good as they can while playing those older players.”
On Thursday morning, the Saginaw Spirit announced that they will select Michael Misa of the Mississauga Senators with the top pick.
Misa, granted exceptional player status, which allows him to enter the draft as an underage player, scored 16 goals and 43 points this season and had 10 goals and 20 points in seven games in the OHL Cup earlier this spring.