Losing Their Lunch At The Combine

The best read of the weekend goes to Ryan Kennedy's article in The Hockey News about the Draft Combine in the Toronto Airport.

This is the event where all the draft prospects are put through brutalizing fitness tests and lead to those stories of guys puking in buckets after getting off the bikes.

This year's tests were no different and Kennedy documents the whole thing meticulously. Great reading.

"In terms of big-name results, Nikita Filatov of Red Army was the most anticipated of his section. In fact, if you judged on how many people were gathered, you'd conclude watching Filatov do curl-ups was the most entertaining thing in the world to watch.

Filatov did better than some expected on the bench press, lifting the 150 pounds six times. And while he seemed to have a good time with the Vertec jump, his 1.8 was one of the lowest totals scored (Drew Doughty was slightly lower).

The VO2 was Filatov's undoing. Maybe there were some translation issues, but it looked as though he gave up a couple times. At one point, an official braced to catch him, as it looked like he would fall over. When he was finished, Filatov looked as though he had gone 12 rounds with a prizefighter: He wobbled back and forth and really didn't seem to know where he was."

- The Hockey News