With all eyes on Scott Morrow, Hurricanes’ top prospect looks the part in summer glimpse
Afterward, Scott Morrow said he didn’t pick up on the sense of anticipation that followed him onto the ice, the murmur in the crowd when he emerged from the dressing room, the very specific elation that accompanied his goals — the only two scored — in the four-on-four portion of Thursday’s prospect scrimmage.
Make no mistake. The Carolina Hurricanes fans who filled the stands at Wake Competition Center were watching his every move, fully aware that with Seth Jarvis fully ensconced in the NHL and Jack Drury moving up from the AHL, Morrow is now the organization’s top skater prospect. Only goalie Pyotr Kotchetov, pressed into action in the playoffs but headed to the AHL next season, compares.
Morrow looked every bit the part in this week’s development camp, a format that happens to show off the NHL-ready parts of his game — the vision, the puck skills, the skating ability with an elite change of direction and lateral movement — while camouflaging almost all the reasons he’s headed back to UMass for his sophomore year.
“I just think I need to be more prepared physically, spend more time in the weight room before I’m ready to play against men,” Morrow said. “That’s something I’m going to take really seriously during the college season, playing two games a week and having the whole week to prepare and be in the weight room. That’s something I look at as a huge positive.”
There’s also work to be done on defensive fundamentals, which is why there was no debate between Morrow and the Hurricanes about going back to school after he earned All-American honors as a freshman. (Cale Makar, four years ahead of him in Amherst, did not.) Defensively, physically — at 6-foot-2, 195 pounds — Morrow has plenty of room to get better.
“The skill set’s there,” UMass coach Greg Carvel said. “He could sign and be ready on the skill side. It’s everything else that’s not ready. He learned a lot this year about the level of conditioning that’s required and he has a long way to go. But he has such a great body, when he gets that body in peak shape, he’ll be that much better of a player.”
Keeping the pipeline flowing
There’s a lot riding on Morrow, a second-round pick in 2021, and not only because he could slot in as a ready-made replacement for new acquisition Brent Burns on the right side of the top four when Burns’ contract expires in three seasons.
The days when the Hurricanes annually drafted early in the first round are over, when they even have a first-round pick at all. And with the Hurricanes up against the salary cap in perpetuity now, it’s essential that some of these higher-risk later picks pan out to keep the pipeline flowing with useful players on entry-level contracts to balance out the big money contracts at the top. That’s only going to become more pressing in two years when Sebastian Aho, Jaccob Slavin, Brett Pesce and Teuvo Teravainen all need new contracts.
The Hurricanes have tried to accumulate less-expensive picks in the second, third and fourth rounds to be able to throw as many darts at that board as possible. Morrow appears to have been a bulls-eye. Former Hurricanes defenseman Bobby Sanguinetti was an observer Thursday; his trained eye saw it all, even in that brief window of action.
“You watch the way he holds onto the puck and the way he thinks the game, he’s got something special,” Sanguinetti said. “It’s just kind of rounding out the other stuff. That takes time. This is a good week for him to come in and see where he’s at.”
In some ways, Morrow is a test case for how good players can slip out of the first round. The Connecticut native played for Minnesota prep hockey factory Shattuck St. Mary’s during his draft year, the same school that produced Sidney Crosby and former Hurricanes draft pick Jack Johnson, although they had both moved on to play at higher levels by their draft years. (Not that either resume needed polishing.)
Morrow did have a short junior-hockey stint in the USHL at the end of that season, brief but impressive enough to seal the deal for UMass when Morrow decommitted from North Dakota — the latter program wanted him to spend a year in the USHL, while Morrow was ready to move on. Still, most NHL scouts only saw him at Shattuck.
NHL teams are notoriously wary of high school players early in the draft, even at Shattuck, and for good reason. It’s easy for a bigger, highly skilled player like Morrow to look completely dominant against that lesser competition only to struggle against stronger, better players when they do move up to the next level. There’s a long line of first-round busts who fit that description.
High risk, high reward
Throw in Morrow’s unquestioned offensive ability but very raw defensive game, and that made him a very high-risk-high-reward draft choice — perfect in the second round for the Hurricanes, whose faith was rewarded when Morrow had no trouble translating his offensive skills to the college game, although Carvel said he protected his star freshman carefully in terms of matchups and zone usage.
Now, as a sophomore, Morrow will be asked not only to get bigger and stronger but develop into a two-way defenseman who can play in all situations, not only moving forward with the puck on his stick but on the penalty kill and protecting a lead late in games. And even as elite a skater he is, he needs to get better when opposing players come at him with speed. Carvel remembers sitting with him as they watched a video clip of a winger blowing past Morrow.
“He said to me, ‘I don’t think I’m ready to handle (Connor) McDavid yet.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not,’ ” Carvel said. “The great thing about Scotty is he’s very self-aware. He knows what he’s good at. He knows what he needs to work on. He’s one of the wisest hockey people I’ve worked with at this level. He’s very aware of everything.”
Being able to handle McDavid is still a few steps ahead in his career, and why the Hurricanes — as excited as they may be about his vision and explosiveness — had no problem with Morrow returning to school. Even Makar spent two years at UMass.
“His progression is very, very good,” Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell said. “I’d be shocked if he doesn’t come out after next year. We had that conversation with him at the end of the season and him and his family thought it would be best if he stayed back in school and we support that. But he’s going to get to a point where there’s not much more you can do in college.”
Morrow isn’t there yet, not entirely. He offered a glimpse this week of what it’s going to look like when he is. He may not have realized how closely he was being watched, but he was impossible to miss.
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This story was originally published July 16, 2022 at 6:40 AM with the headline "With all eyes on Scott Morrow, Hurricanes’ top prospect looks the part in summer glimpse."
