Drafting and developing young players is never easy. But these days, information is much easier to come by than in previous years. Not only is it possible to get video footage nearly instantaneously from just about any league in the world, but it’s pretty easy to find reliable information on a player’s age, position, height, weight… you name it, you can find it.

That was not the case in the early days of the Calgary Flames franchise, back when they were operating out of scenic Atlanta, Georgia. And in the 1975 NHL Amateur Draft, it resulted in a pretty weird circumstance, when the Flames drafted a completely different player than they had intended.

So in the early days of the NHL Draft, teams were primarily focused on scouting junior leagues throughout Canada, with scouting in now-common places like college or Europe seen as an extravagance. But with the NHL rapidly increasing its number of teams during the early days of the draft – from six teams in 1963 to 18 in 1975 – and competition for the domestic pool of players from the 14 teams in the World Hockey Association, teams began looking for an edge. As a result, teams like the Flames began dipping their toes into European scouting, relying on part-timers to give them scouting reports about players worth selecting.

One such player during the 1974-75 season was forward Kent Nilsson, who played his club hockey with Djurgardens IF but also was a standout for Sweden’s national junior team. By the time the draft rolled around, the Flames felt that Nilsson was a player worth taking a chance on, so they put in a claim in the 12th round for a forward with the surname Nilsson from the Swedish national junior team.

They ended up selecting Torbjorn Nilsson instead of Kent Nilsson.

Here’s why: Kent Nilsson was too young to be drafted. At the time, players had to be 20 years or older to be eligible for selection in the amateur draft. Both Torbjorn and Kent Nilsson were players on the Swedish national junior team, and the Swedish roster at the World Juniors that year featured 10 players born in 1955 and 10 born in 1956. The players born in 1955, such as Torbjorn Nilsson, were old enough to be drafted, the players born in 1956, such as Kent Nilsson, were not. And at the time, the NHL did not have a reliable clearinghouse of information on draft eligible prospects – the Central Scouting Service wasn’t set up until the following year – so every team more or less had to stumble their way through the selection process.

By the following year’s draft, Kent Nilsson’s excellence was no longer a well-kept secret, and the Flames selected him in the fourth round. Nilsson came over to North America in 1977, but with the WHA’s Winnipeg Jets, his rights acquired by the Jets from the Toronto Toros and a successful recruitment pitch made for him to play on a team with fellow Swedes like Anders Hedberg, Willy Lindstrom and Ulf Nilsson (no relation).

Nilsson eventually did end up with the Flames, as Atlanta selected his NHL rights from the Jets during the 1979 WHA merger with the NHL. To this day, Nilsson still holds several Flames franchise scoring records – including the single-season scoring record of 131 points, set in 1980-81.

The Flames ended up with the player they wanted all along; it just took a little bit more manoeuvring than they had anticipated.