Jerry Forton’s path to his current role as the Sabres’ director of amateur scouting was different. As a student at the University at Buffalo in the 1980s, he starred in both hockey and soccer. He obtained his law degree in 1989 and embarked on a six-year stint as an assistant coach for the university’s soccer team. During that time, he had a small law practice and was an agent representing a few hockey players. Even though he was more accomplished in soccer, Forton’s passion was always hockey.

Advertisement

That’s what led him to take a volunteer coaching position at Niagara University in 1995 when the school was starting its hockey program. A year into it, the position became full time, and Forton gave up coaching soccer and practicing law to go all in on hockey.

“There were a lot of years where I wasn’t making much money,” Forton said with a laugh. “But it’s worked out.”

Forton spent 18 seasons in college hockey at Niagara, the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and Harvard. As an assistant, he was often tasked with heading up recruiting efforts, and that led to his love of scouting. He came on board with the Sabres in 2013 as an assistant coach but lasted only a year on the coaching staff before Tim Murray wanted to move him to the scouting side.

That all feels relevant to this moment, because Forton is now the one in charge of the Sabres’ amateur scouting department. While he could still be on the road for 200 games or spending all of his waking hours studying video, Forton is responsible for distilling all the information collected by the team’s scouts and analytics department. A law background and years spent toiling away on the college recruiting trail before arriving in the NHL seems like an appropriate blend of skills for the job.

In 2020, the Sabres significantly trimmed their scouting staff, but under general manager Kevyn Adams, they’ve methodically built it back up. Forton oversees a team of 12 scouts, and the Sabres also revamped their analytics department, which is now led by Sam Ventura and includes two staffers below him. Ventura recently outlined how 90-percent of his department’s effort this season was dedicated toward building NHL Draft models. Forton has to make sure the process of blending data with scouting is a smooth one.

Sam Ventura’s name came up a lot during draft week. Talked to the Sabres’ VP of hockey strategy and research about how he and his analytics department spent the last year building systems geared specifically for the NHL Draft

@TheAthletic

— Matthew Fairburn (@MatthewFairburn) August 11, 2022

“It helps that Jerry is the person leading the way there,” Ventura said. “He’s just such a fantastic director. He makes sure everyone’s voice is heard. He’s extremely well-prepared. Detail oriented. He knows the players inside and out and knows each staff member’s opinion on players inside and out and that includes our stats team as well. I think the fact that he’s in that position of leadership helps.”

Advertisement

Forton’s background undoubtedly plays into how prepared he felt when Adams named him a director in 2021. He’s been in the hockey world for more than 20 years and feels like he needed every bit of experience he’s had to be ready for this job.

“I don’t think I would have wanted to be a director one day earlier than when I was,” Forton said. “I think the timing was perfect for me to take all of the different experiences I had, I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I think the timing was right for me to do this job. The base I had with all my different experiences and the timing for our organization, I’m thankful to Kevyn for that. Everyone seems to be really anxious in this business. Maybe I was at times. I don’t know. But I think it was the right progression at the right time for me.”

The timing seems like it was right for the Sabres, too. Forton’s personality makes him open to ideas and willing to adapt. So as the NHL has incorporated more video scouting and analytics into the draft process, Forton was ready to dive in. He welcomed Ventura and his team with open arms, adapted to a helter-skelter, pandemic-altered hockey schedule and travel restrictions, and helped lead the franchise through a pair of pivotal drafts in which it had 22 picks.

Whether the Sabres got enough of those picks right will be reflected in the on-ice results in the years to come. But from an hour-long conversation with Forton, it’s clear the team has evolved in its approach to the draft. Many shuddered when Terry Pegula defended the mass exodus of scouts in 2020 by talking about being effective, efficient and economic. Adams was wise to alter that course a year later and expand the staff. Forton, though, hasn’t lost sight of how important it still is to cover as much ground as possible by taking advantage of data and video.

Forton said he’s more than comfortable with the size of the Sabres’ scouting staff as it is constructed. And the advancements in video technology over the last five years have made it even easier to cover more ground. The Sabres won’t draft a player in any round unless they have somewhere between 50 and 100 game reports on him through in-person viewings and video scouting.

Advertisement

And getting that coverage is where Forton said Ventura and the analytics department have been so valuable. A lot of NHL teams have analytics departments. They all have access to data. But Ventura and his staff blew Forton away with the volume of their coverage and the way they spot trends. As analytics have become more advanced, Ventura is now working with a bigger sample size of historical data. That helps him and his staff further recognize what is useful when they’re building models. In that way, Ventura’s experience in Pittsburgh is invaluable.

“Someone can do it and look at everything from the past couple of years and have theories,” Forton said. “But just like a scout, it’s not as useful until you’ve seen the thing all the way through and you’ve seen a lot of different cycles on certain players. That’s where it’s evolving and where the value is from an amateur perspective, the fact that you can look back four, five or six years and say, ‘This player had this profile and now I’m looking at a similar profile here.’ There’s a lot of other things that go into it, so you can’t get fooled by it. But just to have that historical data and what he’s putting together on his platform to build that, just like we’re building books on players as they come through their draft year and post-draft year and a year into their pro career or five years into their pro career and we have hundreds and hundreds of reports on them, he’s building all of that analytically. What did the player look like in his draft year? What did he look like in the American league? What did he look like his first year as a pro? So it’s the volume of coverage from all of the amateur and pro leagues around the world and being able to organize that information is Sam’s strength and where things have evolved here.”

Forton tries to make sure the analytics staff and the scouting staff are arriving at independent conclusions before he starts to blend the information from both groups. The two sides don’t agree on everything, but Forton said the disagreements aren’t as frequent as you’d think. It’s not that everyone is thinking the same, it’s just easier to agree on what a player is accomplishing at his current level and what his skill set is. If there are dramatic differences of opinion based on a scout’s eye and the data, Forton makes sure those are fleshed out by mid-year or three-quarters of the way through the season.

He also likes to leave room for opinions to change, because they often do throughout the season. Both the scouts and the analytics department like to have at least 20 games on a player before they start to feel confident in the same size. The later into the season it goes, the easier it is to cement evaluations and bring the two sides together.

Years ago, Forton said scouts could spend plenty of time debating what they were seeing in a player. That happened, in part, because the coverage wasn’t as thorough. If two different scouts each saw six games of a player but one saw the six worst and another saw the six best, they wouldn’t come to draft meetings with the same picture of that prospect. Now between analytics and video, it’s easier to fill those blind spots and paint a complete picture.

“The debate becomes how does that project out at the next level?” Forton said. “Or the level after that? Some of these players we’re watching are going to go up two or three different times in level before they ever get to the NHL. Sam’s group has great models on what they think might project out. Scouts with their experience and continuing to watch how players play out post-draft and how that influences your decision-making as a scout, all of that is going into trying to figure out what you’re seeing right now and how does that project out for or five years down the line? We’re sitting on so much other information that goes hand in hand with that. The athletic testing, the due diligence, the character background, the drive of a player with his club team and at the international level in different settings. How much does that factor into the guys who make it or don’t make it as they go up levels? I really do believe that’s 95 percent of the science and debate these days. That’s continuing to evolve.”

That’s where Forton is aided by his experience as a coach. As a college coach who was heavily involved in recruiting, he had to live with his decisions. His mistakes in scouting or projecting a player were staring him in the face every day at practice. Forton is also quick to point to the 2013 season as a crucial one for his career.

Advertisement

Ron Rolston brought Forton over from Harvard to be an assistant on the Sabres’ staff. That season was a disaster for Buffalo. The team won only 21 games and finished last in the Eastern Conference. Rolston was let go in November, the team traded away veterans throughout the year and relied on an increasingly young lineup. Forton switched to the scouting staff the following season, but he’s grateful he was able to see things from a coach’s point of view and be in that locker room throughout the struggle.

“I wouldn’t have traded that year for anything I’ve ever done in the hockey world in terms of my experience and how much that has helped me going forward, especially as an amateur scout in the NHL,” Forton said. “To see firsthand an NHL locker room and to coach 18-year-olds in the NHL and 33-year-olds in the NHL and to work with some really good people — Joe Sacco and Teppo Numminen and Ronny, and Darcy (Regier) was still around. For better or worse, the experiences of that year I felt like that was worth five years of hockey experience for me and not just coaching-related. How the NHL operates, the pressure on players in the NHL, the young players in the league from a scouting perspective, seeing the players that were drafted before I got here … you learn so much being around people in the NHL every year. You can take something from everyone.”

The perspective of those dark times is important as the Sabres have started to turn a corner in the court of public opinion. There is legitimate optimism because of what Adams and his staff have done over the last 12 months. Forton was emotional when talking about Adams at the NHL Draft because his leadership and the way he trusts those underneath him have impacted the work culture in Buffalo.

Forton wants to be that same way as a director. He wants everyone to have a voice and to feel as if they had a hand in the final product. With the help of the analytics staff, Forton estimates the team is now able to get a thorough understanding of up to 400 players each draft year. Even in a year with 11 picks, a small percentage of those players end up in the organization. But having that information on players that end up elsewhere is still valuable for future trades or free-agent acquisitions.

That’s why Forton doesn’t buy into the idea that analytics, scouts and coaches need to be at odds with one another. He spent a lot of time in rinks and dark video rooms jotting down information by hand. That helps him appreciate what Ventura’s models can accomplish.

“It’s funny to me when I hear about coaches being at odds with analytics because to me whether coaches will admit it or not coaches were at the forefront of analytics,” Forton said. “Twenty-five years ago I sat down after every single game and watched five hours with the coaches and we marked every single scoring chance and who was in on every single scoring chance for and against, hits, turnovers, puck battles, and everything else you could possibly imagine. The only difference now is analytics removes a lot of the biases we probably had when we were marking all of that information. And they’re able to do it quicker on many more games. Coaches have always highly valued that information. Now you just have to trust and make sure you have the right people so you’re getting the proper information but in more volume.”

Forton said now the most important part of his job is making sense of all of that information and making sure it all factors into the Sabres’ decision-making process. There’s more information and it’s coming from more people, and that’s necessary, in Forton’s view:

“The days of just one area scout or a couple of scouts driving things to draft a player or not draft a player are long gone in the league.”

(Photo: Dan Hamilton / USA TODAY Sports)