BUFFALO — Score one for Jack Eichel.
Almost every general manager will tell you that the fitness portion of the NHL Draft Combine is a mostly meaningless evaluator of talent. No one ever picks or passes on a prospect based on how high he can jump or how many pull-ups he can do. For the most part, it is a baseline test of where a player is at a certain point of his development.
And yet, because test scores are flashed on a giant video screen, it is natural for players to want to score higher than their peers — or in the case of Eichel, his biggest rival.