Saskatchewan poised for bountiful harvest in WHL bantam draft

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The draft was originally scheduled to be a live event in Red Deer, but that changed due to COVID-19.

It will now be conducted remotely via the same online system used for the annual CHL import draft.

The Pats are running their draft from a boardroom in their office. They’ll have a skeleton crew led by Paddock and head scout Dale McMullin, along with director of hockey operations Gord Pritchard and director of hockey analytics Landon Watson.

The remainder of the scouting staff will be connected with Zoom, a Web-based video conferencing application.

“Zoom has worked pretty efficiently,” said Paddock, whose staff has utilized the app for pre-draft meetings. “It’s probably going to become the wave of the future.”

There are also some challenges with a virtual setup. The biggest one for Paddock is the fact that he won’t be able to communicate in person with other teams.

“The issue created by a new system is trades,” he added. “You can’t get up and walk to a table and talk about players. You’re not going to see the other general managers at the Alberta Cup (before the draft). I will have talked to everybody in the last couple weeks but it’s just different that way. I guess it’s another part of not knowing how it’s going to unfold.”

gharder@postmedia.com