Penguins head to Buffalo for last scouting of 2025 at the NHL combine

Important week that will be mostly out of the spotlight

It’s an important week for NHL teams, even though it’s mostly unmonitored. The NHL’s draft combine kicks off today in Buffalo and lasts through June 7th.

From the league:

“The NHL Combine is a rite of passage on a player’s path to the NHL and is an event that NHL clubs and prospects look forward to participating in,” NHL Central Scouting director Dan Marr said.

The combine, which will run June 2-7, gives the 32 NHL teams physical and medical assessments of the top prospects ahead of the 2025 draft at L.A. Live’s Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on June 27-28.

“The NHL combine is the final showcase event before the NHL Draft,” Marr said, “and it’s a week full of interviews, medicals, and fitness testing where the players get to interact with NHL personnel and the NHL clubs get to learn as much as possible about the future stars of our game.”

There will be 58 forwards, 27 defensemen and five goalies attending the combine. All are listed in NHL Central Scouting’s final rankings of North American and International skaters and goaltenders.

NHL Central Scouting will again provide an app for all attending prospects to download to their mobile devices, containing all the information they need to navigate the gamut of interviews with NHL teams and medical and fitness testing.

Teams can conduct 1-on-1 interviews with prospects at KeyBank Center from June 2-6. The medical examinations will take place June 4, the Maximal VO2 test on June 6, and the remaining seven of the 11 fitness tests will be at HarborCenter on June 7 (standing height/wingspan, horizontal jump, force plate vertical jumps, bench press, pro agility test, pull-ups, Wingate Cycle Ergometer test).

No player can test until clearing the medical screening.

The last sentence looms large and could have a big impact on the top of the draft. Roger McQueen is a top prospect but was limited last season by a serious back injury. Based on his size and skill, scouts would rank him in the top-3 or easily top-5 this year if only going with on ice activity. NHL teams can’t draft on that alone, and will need to see how his medicals go and what their doctors make of McQueen’s prognosis in the future. That outcome will decide if McQueen is available for the Pens at pick 11, but the information gleamed could potentially make him a pass for them as well.

Here are the 90 players invited:

Dubas and company will have to cast a wide net, they could be able to draft several of these players. The Pens are set to pick 11th, 59th, 73rd, 84th and 85th, barring any trades on draft dat. They could also be given the Rangers’ 12th overall pick this year, should NYR choose.

Most fans link pro combines with the NFL, where performance in key drills (such as the 40 yard dash) could make or break the draft position of players. But those at the NFL combine are usually 20-22 years old and very close to finished products, physically speaking — at least compared to the 17-18 year olds at the NHL combine that have many years to go before developing the strength and experience necessary to make an impact at the NHL level.

In that way, while the NFL combine keys in on physical performance and where the player is right in this moment while the NHL combine is more broad and about getting to know the prospect, seeing their personality and getting a sense of what they could project into becoming. There’s still stress, pressure and importance to show well, but it is a slightly different type of event than the famous NFL combine. As The Athletic put it:

The NFL Scouting Combine features college football players on the cusp of becoming professionals. As such, a participant who blows up stopwatches in Indianapolis could hear his name called sooner at the NFL Draft.

In comparison, an NHL combine performance does not usually influence when a player is selected. It is an early snapshot of data that will be accumulated for years, in most cases, before NHL entry. The intelligence teams gather during interviews preceding testing is just as important, if not more so.

The primary value is for teams to initiate an informational foundation. Once a club drafts a player, it adds more data at post-draft development camps, preseason testing and year-end physicals throughout the player’s career, all with the intent of maximizing performance.

“There’s not a ton there that’s predictive of future NHL success. We recognize that,” Neeld said. “But I look at it more as: What information would you want to know about a player that you’re about to make an investment in?”

No one ranked in the 40’s or 50’s is going to have a great turn on the bike for the dreaded VO2 max test and end up as a first round pick as a result, unlike the way a wide receiver or cornerback could run a 4.2 40 and end up rocketing up the board. That’s not the way this process works in hockey. This week’s reports and news will tell teams if it’s a good medical idea to draft Roger McQueen with a high first round pick and help plant the seeds on their targets, but mostly in quiet and off-the-radar ways. It’s important work but not much to track or follow until the pay offs happen on draft day and then years beyond.