Yes, the draft is a puzzle that can be solved many ways. It is the way to victory. And the road to ruin as well. From Guy Lafleur to Sidney Crosby to Connor McDavid, the annual draft of hockey’s most talented young prospects has long been considered the way to riches for its top talents and the path to the greatest heartache and disappointment as well. Each June, the hockey world convenes to see the game’s young stars chosen by their future teams (or the first of their NHL teams). Callow juniors and their parents wait in anticipation for the call that will shape their destiny. Though owners and general managers have attempted to use trades and/or free agency to build their clubs into winners over the years, it’s the NHL draft that has proven the special sauce in creating a championship-calibre operation. Since the introduction of a hard salary cap in 2005, drafting has seen an even greater onus placed on it.

With Inexact Science, the curious and captivating events of the NHL draft’s five-plus decades will be told through the six most compelling years in its history. In addition to analyzing these top draft years, “Inexact Science” will show the lessons learned from the process of guessing hockey horoscopes, how it changed the business of the game and finally where the draft is headed next. By looking at what history has shown us, the final chapter of the book will demonstrate the ways in which the best organizations in pro hockey today have played the crapshoot of the draft so expertly. Light will be shed not only on the sure shots or diamonds in the rough, but also the supposed can’t-miss prospects who indeed did somehow miss and the general managers who paid the price for getting it all so wrong.

There have certainly been a fair share of controversies, blockbuster trades, innovative ideas and/or plain old bad judgement that made up these six most intriguing years and in this book, several lingering points of interest will be delved into. For example, just how did the Detroit Red Wings get the jump on the European talent bonanza (namely the Russian revolution) to propel them to a quarter century of runaway success? Why were Sam Pollock’s Montreal Canadiens able to exploit the inexperience and mismanagement of the NHL’s bumbling expansion teams to their benefit at the draft, en route to Stanley Cup after Stanley Cup? And why exactly is 1979 considered perhaps the greatest draft of all time and how did it come to be seen that way?