Dakota Keene, Amateur Scouting Operations Manager for the New Jersey Devils, stands in the Norway Savings Bank Arena in Auburn on June 20 in the spot he usually occupies when scouting ice hockey talent. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

When the New Jersey Devils announce their selections at the NHL entry draft this weekend, a St. Dominic Academy graduate will have played a pivotal role behind each pick.

Dakota Keene, a 29-year-old Poland native, is in his second season as a manager in the club’s amateur scouting operations department.

Keene, who works in a variety of areas in the Devils’ scouting department, will send each pick to the league’s central registry this weekend.

“We have almost 20 scouts on the amateur side, and I help to manage that entire group of running our meetings and help build our draft list and keep that organized so we are prepared for draft day, but I also get out on the road,” said Keene, who spent the 2021-22 season as the American Hockey League’s Hockey Operations Coordinator.

Keene, who moved to Wells after his stint at the AHL office in Springfield, Massachusetts, has a short drive to Boston, where he got to see several projected top 10 picks play this past season. The consensus No. 1 pick, Macklin Celebrini, played at Boston University.

Other players who will hear their names called early in the first round on Friday night at the Sphere in Las Vegas also played games in Boston.

New Jersey will pick 10th in the first round.

“This year, there were a lot of top prospects who came through New England,” Keene said. “Michigan State at (Boston College), and I was able to see Denver a couple of times out East as well.”

Artyom Levshunov, a Michigan State defenseman, is a projected top-5 pick. Denver’s Zeev Buium, another defenseman who has moved up the draft rankings this season, is expected to go in the top 10.

The U.S. National Team Development Program Under-18 team, which will have many players drafted either Friday (first round) or Saturday (rounds two through seven), played an exhibition game against Boston University. Keene was in attendance.

In addition to scouting draft-eligible college players, Keene also scouts New England prep school games and some junior hockey games.

Keene said he’s always busy during the day before heading to a 7 p.m. college game that evening. Most of the day is spent reading scouting reports submitted by the other scouts from the night before or looking at videos of certain players.

“I will look at reports in the morning, then I will start breaking down the film throughout the day of certain guys,” Keene said. “Get that clipped and put that in the (player’s) folder and then handle that day-to-day email between the staff and then head out to a game. If I am going to a game at (University of New Hampshire), I will be home by 11. If I am at a game at BC, BU or Northeastern, I am back a little later, 12:30, then start over the next day.”

During the offseason, it’s a little different, especially leading up to the draft.

“With the draft just a few days out, it’s more of that draft list prep and making sure the list is organized the way we want,” Keene said. “We are starting to focus in more on some pressure points that we have that we need to discuss in our last set of meetings before the draft.”

Those meetings usually focus on any last pieces of information scouts have received from sources regarding a player.

Like most of the 32 teams in the NHL, the Devils will arrive in Las Vegas a few days prior to the draft so the front office and scouting staff can meet.

Keene said those meetings can be stressful because it’s one of the few times each year everybody is in the same room.

They also meet right after Christmas.

“Leading up to any of our big meetings — that midterm meeting and the end-of-the-year meeting — not crazy stressful, but a different level of stress where you have everything organized so things run smooth and stay as much as possible on task and following our itinerary just because we have scouts coming in all over the world,” Keene said. “We want to make sure while we have that small time period where we are all together to accomplish as much as we possibly can.”

The draft can also be stressful as teams draft players they hope will become superstars.

“I am the one who submits all of our picks to the NHL database,” Keene said. “I run the one computer we have at the table, and obviously, that can be a stressful position as well, as you are on a time limit. You are kind of making that pick, following along on the list we created, seeing what our options are there, and making sure that pick is submitted on time, the right player, all of those types of things.”

GOAL TO BECOME A GM

Keene graduated from St. Dom’s in 2013 before playing a few seasons with the Portland Jr. Pirates and South Shore Kings organizations. He then played at Division III University of Massachusetts-Boston from 2016-20, where he was a finalist for the Hockey Humanitarian Award in 2020, presented annually to college hockey’s “finest citizen” for leadership in community service.

While at UMass-Boston, he had an internship with the Arizona Coyotes. After graduating with a management degree — with a concentration in entrepreneurship and a minor in economics — he interned with the St. Louis Blues. In 2018, he also worked with the National Women’s Hockey League.

Keene also had his own company, OnFocus Hockey, in which he evaluated players through video and provided feedback while working alongside local area coaches Cam Robichaud and Caleb Labrie at PucDevelopment in Lewiston.

Now, he’s on the path to work up the front-office ladder.

“Being able to get in a position like my current role as a management position at an early age — in reality, I know I am getting older — but I am still young in the eyes of staff in the NHL,” Keene said. “I feel like I have had a pretty good head start thanks to some of my past employers and connections and things like that. I feel like I put myself in a good spot, in my opinion. That’s the end goal, to kind of prove myself and hopefully get some opportunities to continue to do that and, one day, possibly be a GM in the NHL.”