Draft day is all about the upside. It's a happy day, the wrong time to bring up to many of the things that are "bracket worthy." You know, stuff like:

This kid can skate! (So if we can just aim him in the right direction...). This kid can score! (Body contact makes him cry). This kid is huge! (We can teach him hockey, right?)

The lesson for fans? A little realism goes a long way. It's really tough to pick the right kids.

Scouting young players is harder in hockey than any other sport. Much like any setting that requires a group decision, most scouts (for fear of looking dumb) tend to go along with what everyone else says.

Unlike other sports (I'm looking at you, NBA), hockey teams can't just draft the tallest kids. Or the biggest ones (cough, NFL, cough). We can't even lean on Moneyball-like statistics – there aren't many stat categories for hockey and they aren't recorded well enough at the junior levels.

To make things even harder, there are too many roles to play on a hockey team, and most young kids aren't even penciled into one yet. Save for a few massive beasts, most players start out as goal-scorers. Adjustments come later.

Remember that 210 kids are drafted every year into a league that has fewer than 800 jobs. If the average NHL career lasted four years the math would be fine, but the average is closer to 10. Which means less than half of these kids are going to pan out.

Aside from the long odds, it's just stupid hard to tell who's going to turn into what.

It's impossible to calibrate the ever-important mental side of hockey, when you have to compare European players to North Americans, and you have different scouts conducting the interviews with players in different leagues in different languages. Combine that with very little standard baseline testing, and teams often don't know what level of hockey intelligence each player has – let alone their motivation level.

So they do exactly what every young, talented hockey player that doesn't get drafted complains about: When teams get past the obvious talent pieces and into the deeper rounds, they draft the biggest players and players with the best stats – ideally, a combination of the two. How could they possibly weigh all the intangibles that go into making a quality NHLer when every country is churning out hockey talent these days?

Who knows to what extent certain players were favored – or worse, buried – by their coaches. It can have a huge effect on a player's season, and makes for some apples-to-oranges comparisons.

For NHL players, ice time is documented. Takeaways and giveaways. Blocked shots. Hits.

For the majority of junior teams, European leagues and college teams, none of these things are documented. They just don't have the budgets to hire people to do those jobs and, when they do, they don't have the budgets to hire quality people. Even the plus/minus rating of a college player should come with an asterisk stipulating, "here's the kid's plus/minus – plus or minus 10."

With all due respect to the difficult jobs of NHL scouts, it's all loosely-educated guesswork.

It's easy to tell who's great and who's awful. Between these two extremes, the scouting process often relies on which shifts of which game the scout actually paid attention to. And if scouts haven't had the time or attention span to form one, they'll end up using some other scout's opinion.

The point is, more so than any other sport, the NHL draft is a crapshoot of young, skinny kids. As fans it's easy to attach your hopes to all the nice things about a player written on the cue card prepared for the hosts to read to us, but you simply never know. The teams never know.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take some Prozac and stop raining on everyone's parades.

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