Plane tickets would be in hand, hotels booked, and the highly touted rearguard would be preparing for a handful of team meetings fielding a battery of final questions before the 2020 NHL Draft.
Then, on Friday, it would be the nervous wait-and-see sitting in the stands at the Bell Centre before making the long walk to the stage, where an NHL general manager would hand him his first jersey and hat for his first professional team.
Sadly, none of that is going to happen.
There is no NHL Draft this weekend, nor is there one planned any time soon. The NHL itself remains in limbo without a set return date. And there are now even doubts that the 2019-20 season will be finished, or that a 2020-21 campaign will even occur.
Through all those question marks – and we’re not even getting into the lack of playoff scouting, a testing combine or any of the other myriad pre-draft events -- TSN’s Bob McKenzie has put together his annual top-100 prospects, featuring both North American and European skaters.
And the news was most certainly good for Hunt.
Despite suffering a severe cut to his right arm in early December, an injury that caused him to miss almost two months of action, the Brandon product was listed as 44th overall in McKenzie’s assessment.
That would mean a mid-second round selection in the same ballpark as Joel Edmundson, the St. Louis Blues’ 46th pick in 2011, or Curtis Brown, who went to the Buffalo Sabres 43rd overall in 1994. More recently, the Vancouver Canucks landed Jett Woo with the 37th overall pick in the 2018 draft.
Other ranking organizations had Hunt in a similar position: McKeen’s Hockey had him 69th overall, Central Scouting 25th among North American skaters, and Elite Prospects.com at 65th overall.
Hunt has been a fixture on the Hockey Canada radar much of his career, suiting up in the U17 World Hockey Challenge as well as the World U18 championship in 2018-19 and the Hlinka Gretzky Cup last season.
He put up seven goals and 20 points as a 16-year-old in the Western Hockey League before racking up 15 assists in only 28 games last season.
Warriors goaltender Brock Gould wasn’t among the 100 on McKenzie’s list but is also a top prospect for the draft, having been ranked ninth by Central Scouting among North American goaltenders.
That spot was good enough to land Cole Brady of the USHL’s Fargo Force a fifth-round selection last year, Jared Moe of the USHL’s Waterloo Black Hawks the 184th overall pick in 2018, and Maxim Zhukov of the OHL’s Barrie Colts a fourth-round selection in 2017.
