When Steve Yzerman announced the Tampa Bay Lightning’s second round pick of the 2017 NHL Entry Draft, the Twitterverse was not prepared. Our staff was left scrambling to find anything we could about Alexander Volkov, the overage Russian draft pick. Google searches mostly picked up on a UFC fighter by the same name, not the mysterious hockey player. Almost none of the publicly available scouting services had anything on him.
In retrospect, the simplicity of the answer for why he was an unknown seems obvious. Most of these scouting services are just getting by with minimal budgets.