The NHL Central Scouting Preliminary Rankings were released yesterday, and there were a few players listed who have been suspiciously absent from The Scouting News pages over the years. How is it that a service which claims to know everything worth knowing about competitive youth hockey could perennially overlook any player good enough to be considered for the NHL draft by Central Scouting itself? The answers are easy: 1) The Scouting News is not remotely related to any legitimate scouting or ranking organization; 2) The Scouting News purposely and systematically attempts to blacklist players whose parents have had disagreements with The Scouting News in the past.
No reputable scouting organization is perfect and depending on how deep you look, no two of them produce exactly the same ranking list. These organizations may agree on the top 10, 25 or 30 players in a given year, but beyond that there is a lot of movement. It’s one thing to leave a player off because you honestly don’t think he has the right stuff, but when every other leading (ie. legitimate) scout has a player ranked high enough to be drafted by the NHL and he’s missing from your list, well… let’s just say you’ve got a chip on your shoulder that completely undermines your integrity and credibility
Think about it, friends. You’ve seen all of the claims the News makes about its predictions. They scream about the accuracy and track record of knowing who will make it to the next level. Every year they swindle more impressionable young families into paying to view what they think will be objective or flattering articles about their player. What they get is poorly worded, mispelled compilations of self-promotion submitted by players and parents themselves or gleaned and rehashed from myriad other web sites. If that’s all there were to it, however, this Boycott would not exist. If they want to peddle a poor product and people want to pay for it, we’d say “caveat emptor” and leave it at that. The Scouting News crosses the line by aggressively marginalizing players of parents who so much as question their content. By subscribing to The Scouting News, you are tacitly funding the attempted blacklisting of parents and the isolation of their innocent children from a game they love. Is your ego really so enormous that it must be fed by a publication utterly lacking in integrity regardless of the cost to others?
Hockey is a team sport; which team are you on? Join the Boycott! Don’t give another cent to the Scouting Nazi, don’t renew your subscription, and don’t send them any stories or pictures of your children. Until they post an apology to all hockey parents admitting their practice of blacklisting and marginalization, this Boycott will continue.
Boycott The Scouting News 