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Vancouver Canucks: Pierre-Luc Dubois and Logan Brown Shine at Draft Combine
June 5, 2016, 3:14 PM ET [156 Comments]
Carol Schram
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The 2016 Draft Combine is in the books and as usual, the headlines were dominated by Auston Matthews and Patrik Laine.

Laine does not shy away from making bold statements—I got used to that during the World Championship. I'm more intrigued by his new haircut.




Some have speculated that he may have tidied up his look in an effort to impress Toronto's Lou Lamoriello, who likes his players to look conservative and respectable. Laine continues to argue that he's good enough to be selected first overall, but the consensus seems unchanged, that the Maple Leafs need a centre too much to consider picking a winger, even one as skilled as Laine.

Beyond the top two, one player who's getting more and more buzz as a possible top five selection is big centre Logan Brown. TSN's Craig Button compares Brown to Joe Thornton—even though he has lots of bulking up still to do. Here's what Gare Joyce reports over at Sportsnet.

Said one veteran scout, “There’s a premium for big centres and I think there’s a shot he goes in the top five. He was great at U18s and in the second half of the season. He’s almost 6-foot-7 and he might be that by the end of the summer. In his interview he told us that he doesn’t know if he has stopped growing yet. He was a good interview, funny kid, not really like his father (former NHLer Jeff Brown), who was not the most social guy.”


Here's where Brown currently stands:




Joyce suggests that Brown would need to add another 25 pounds to his frame—which would likely take two more full seasons—before he's ready to play at the NHL level. His birthday is in March, so he wouldn't be eligible for the AHL until the 2018-19 season, which would most likely mean two more years of development in junior.

The Oilers have a pretty insightful interview with Brown from the Combine:




If Jim Benning is serious about looking for a player with a good personality, Brown may have tipped the scales in his favour this week. He seems to have won over a lot of the media members with his affable character.

As for Pierre-Luc Dubois, he checked in at 6'2" and 200 pounds, and his name popped up in quite a few Top 10 lists for the various fitness tests that the players went through, according to Sportsnet.

Dubois' name also headlined this article on fitness testing results from Adam Kimelman at NHL.com.

Here's Dubois' interview with the Oilers website:




His English is good—and as he points out, his mother's American so he's pretty fluently bilingual.

It's interesting to hear him waffle on the question of whether he sees himself as a centre or a winger. He says he thinks he has "played his best hockey" as a centre but, because the Oilers are looking for a wing, he backpedals to talk about how he has played wing for most of his life and might be more comfortable there.

As for the Canucks, the only material we have is a brief interview with Jim Benning:




Benning's not giving a whole lot away here. Just says that this year's group is really good as a whole.

The amateur scouts will be convening with Benning and his team starting on Monday in Whistler. That's when the list will finally be nailed down.
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