As with any athletic enterprise, the game that we see played for the Stanley Cup has always been but a fraction of the action. The iceberg metaphor has ever been operative: For every hour on the ice watched by millions there were hundreds of hours out of view. A team’s scouts are lauded for landing big talents in the draft and slammed when touted prospects don’t live up to the hype. What we don’t really see these days is the shaping of the player after he has been drafted. Why those in player development aren’t as celebrated as scouts is yours to guess. One possible factor: Someone schooling a prospect doesn’t have quite the same stealthy air of intrigue as a scout out in the field. Another: Among the other professional sports, only baseball has any sort of equivalent position, the roving instructor in the minor leagues. If public awareness of and interest in NHL player development are on the rise, fans are still playing catch-up to execs around the league.

Even decades ago, player development involved more than just selecting a kid at 18, sending him back to junior to ripen, letting him cool his skate heels in the minors a season and then giving him a taste of the league at 21 or 22. But, back then, maybe not a lot more. “After I was drafted by the Bruins [in 1990], they had Jean Ratelle watch my games [at Ferris State University] for four years,” says former NHLer John Gruden, now head coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs. “Jean would come up to me after a game, shake my hand and ask me how I was doing. But that was it, the only real interaction I had with the team.”

It wasn’t just that way for late picks like Gruden. Says Dan Cleary, a first-round pick of Chicago in 1997: “After training camp in September, I didn’t really hear from the team during the season at all. I was basically on my own.”