Inside RBC Center in Raleigh, N.C., Blake Wheeler and family looked around at the other suit-wearing top prospects, a collection of the best teenage hockey players on the planet, gathered that summer day in 2004 to learn their professional fates.



Prospects from the top junior leagues in Canada shook hands and offered waves to familiar competition. Russians Alexander Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin sat a few rows apart, set to be selected first and second. The Wheelers knew almost no one.



Blake had just finished his junior season at The Breck School in Golden Valley where football occupied as much of his time as hockey did. Blake’s dad, James, was a former three-sport athlete who spent time in the Detroit Tigers’ minor-league system, yet never picked up hockey, choosing basketball instead during the winter. He knew so little of the sport that he used to bring the newspaper to Blake’s early hockey practices so that he’d be occupied. So, to them, the...