Taro Tsujimoto

In 1971, the World Hockey Association (WHA) was founded, and began signing amateur players before the National Hockey League (NHL) could officially select them in the amateur draft. To counter the WHA, NHL president Clarence Campbell decided to conduct the 1974 draft in secret over a phone call instead of in person. This decision made the overall process painfully slow, as Campbell would call each team individually to tell them which previous players had already been selected before they could make their pick. Punch Imlach, general manager of the Buffalo Sabres, was frustrated by the absurd length of the draft, and in the late rounds decided to have fun and draft someone unusual. He asked Sabres director of communications Paul Wieland to help create a fictitious player and their backstory. Imlach's 10th-round draft pick, Derek Smith, was the last player left in the draft pool that Imlach wanted; he felt that none of the remaining available players had any realistic chance of making the team. Wieland wanted the player to be of Japanese descent, and he knew what the last name would be. As a college student driving Route 16 from Buffalo to St. Bonaventure, Wieland would regularly pass by a grocery store owned by a Japanese American named Joshua Tsujimoto. The official backstory for Taro Tsujimoto was that he was a 20-year-old forward from Osaka, who put up 15 goals and 25 points in the season before the draft. Tsujimoto played for the Tokyo Katanas, a fictional team in the Japan Ice Hockey League. Imlach approximated the word katana was the closest to the word sabre in the Japanese language, as they were both types of swords. Imlach and Wieland decided to not inform any staff members of the ruse, including Sabres president Seymour H. Knox III. Reporters were told only that Tsujimoto was "the most secret player in the secret draft". Once the draft had concluded, various sports and news outlets published the list of players selected in the draft, a list that included Tsujimoto. As there was practically no NHL scouting in Asia in an era before the World Wide Web, there was no easy way to research whether the Katanas, let alone Tsujimoto, existed. Once Imlach confessed to the hoax, Campbell did not find it funny, and the NHL would eventually change the pick to an "invalid claim" for its official record-keeping purposes. More seriously, in 1975 the Sabres attempted to draft Greg Neeld, who had lost an eye in an incident while playing for the Toronto Marlboros, despite an NHL rule that players must have sight in both eyes. ==Legacy==

Tsujimoto quickly became an inside joke for Sabres fans, with many fans still wearing custom jerseys to this day. In 2011, Panini America created a Taro Tsujimoto hockey card, and included it within select box sets as a collector's item. In 2013, the New Era Cap Company sold Tokyo Katanas hats to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Tsujimoto's draft selection. Wieland himself referenced the joke in his 2019 autobiography Taro Lives!: Confessions of the Sabres Hoaxer. The Hockey News noted in a 2014 article that the Sabres could have opted for one of several potentially impactful players instead of wasting the selection on a joke. For instance, Dave Lumley was selected as the 199th pick by the Montreal Canadiens, Stefan Persson was selected as the 214th pick by the New York Islanders, and Warren Miller was selected as the 241st pick by the New York Rangers. Both Lumley and Persson contributed to multiple Stanley Cup-winning teams in the 1980s, while Miller played in 262 NHL games. The Athletic commented in 2024, in a piece commemorating the 50th anniversary of the hoax, that the Sabres might have drawn more scrutiny for the trick had they not already done well in the draft after selecting a class that included Smith, Lee Fogolin and Danny Gare; The Athletic also noted that the Sabres were not alone in their "wasting" of draft picks, as the expansion Kansas City Scouts and the California Golden Seals had both passed on using their respective eight and ninth round draft selections before the Sabres drafted Tsujimoto. ==See also==