What conclusion do you think we should draw from the fact that during his tenure with the Sabres as Director of Amateur Scouting from 1998 to 2004, Benning presided over what was probably the best sustained period of drafting, particularly in later rounds, of any team in NHL history?
Buffalo Sabres Draft History at hockeydb.com
There are a lot of moving parts there :
1) Frankly, amateur scouting is mostly luck and draft position. The whole notion of anyone being a 'superscout' is patently rubbish.
2) That was 20 years ago, and we have a lot more recent evidence.
3) Most of those years were a really weird time where Buffalo was broke and doing their scouting entirely by video and not paying to have scouts on the road, so the results were created in a very different environment.
4) Benning inherited a staff built by the hugely respected Jack Bowman (Scotty's brother) when Bowman died unexpectedly. They had already chundered out 10 500-game NHLers in the 4 drafts prior to Benning taking over. I think it's fair to say that what happened under Benning was a continuation more than any sort of change or turnaround.
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And again, 20 years ago.
We have a ton of evidence since then. We saw what happened in Boston, where he couldn't draft his way out of a paper bag when running the scouting arm of that organization - worst drafting in the NHL. And we've seen him here, where he wanted Juolevi/Glass with top-5 picks in consecutive drafts. And outside of picks that we know were heavily Brackett influenced (Pettersson + USHL guys) our drafting has continued to suck. And to me, 15-20 years of crappy results more than trumps a few good years two decades ago in a very different time.
And quite frankly, all you really need to do is look at his pro scouting. The notion that someone who thinks that Luca Sbisa and Erik Gudbranson are top-4 NHL defenders and who can't even evaluate who is a good player in the here and now for NHL players right in front of him could be some sort of Rainman who 'sees the future' and can accurately project 17 y/o kids is just nonsense. As I've said many times, it's thinking someone who has to count on their fingers to figure out 3x3 could grasp nuclear physics.