Together with Sabres director of communications Paul Wieland, they created Taro Tsujimoto, a twenty-year-old Japanese forward who played for the fictional Tokyo Katanas of the Japan Ice Hockey League.
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.
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.
[4] The official backstory for Taro Tsujimoto was that he was a twenty-year-old forward from Osaka, who put up fifteen goals and twenty-five points in the season before the draft.
[8][c] 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.
[6] 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.
[5][10] In 2011, Panini America created a Taro Tsujimoto hockey card, and included it within select box sets as a collector's item.