Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2005

In my previous article (How to Rectify the NHL Draft Lottery) I advanced a proposal on how to rectify what I see as the issues with the current NHL Draft Lottery. My proposal was to give each NHL team what I call a Protected Draft Territory or P.D.T.

In that previous article, I listed the apprehensiveness I had with my proposal – that it would bestow an unfair advantage on the NHL’s Canadian teams because of their proximity to large amateur hockey leagues while at the same time unfairly penalize the NHL’s U.S. teams because of their perceived lack of amateur hockey leagues in their vicinity. But as you will see in this article, the application of the P.D.T. to the 2005 Entry Draft did not result in any discernible level of advantage or disadvantage.

At this point I’ll re-iterate the three P.D.T. rules that I applied to the 2005 NHL Entry Draft:

1. A player’s birth place, not his last amateur hockey team before becoming eligible for the NHL Entry Draft, determined which P.D.T., if any, the player would be eligible for.
2. Where more than one NHL team shares a natural territory (such as a province or a state), how close a player’s birth place is to an NHL team determined which P.D.T. the player would be eligible for.
3. As each player was removed from the original entry draft because of designation under the P.D.T., the players below the removed player were moved up in the draft order. This seems rather arbitrary. But without any knowledge of what each team would have drafted had the player they originally drafted not been available, it seems like a fair compromise. So, for example, if the first player chosen in the original entry draft had been designated under the P.D.T., the second player chosen in the original entry draft was moved up to the first player chosen in the revised entry draft.

The year 2005 saw a nice rebound in the talent level of the available players for the NHL Entry Draft. This rebound was, of course, led by Sidney Crosby. Yet again, the application of the three simple rules above may have altered the history of the NHL as we know it. A few key players on Cup winning teams might not have been there to help those teams win their Cups or perhaps might have helped their new teams win a Cup instead.

Table 1 below is actually two tables in one. The first six columns represent how the original NHL Entry Draft played out. The second six columns represent how a revised NHL Entry Draft might have transpired after the application of the P.D.T. rules.

Table 1.

Heading the list of recognizable names from the original 2005 Entry Draft would, of course, be Sidney Crosby. Other well-known names are, Bobby Ryan, Jack Johnson, Carey Price, Devin Setoguchi, Anze Kopitar, Marc Staal, Martin Hanzal, Tuukka Rask, T.J. Oshie, Andrew Cogliano, Matt Niskanen, and Steve Downie.

With the application of the P.D.T. rule to the 2005 Entry Draft, the Maple Leafs would not have fared as well as they had in previous years. With eight players being designated under the P.D.T. before the Maple Leafs drafted in the 21^st position, the Leafs would have lost the ability to draft Tuukka Rask.  The players the Leafs might have designated under the P.D.T. rule and drafted in the 21^st position of the revised draft did not go on to have long or illustrious careers.

With six of the top eight original picks being designated under the P.D.T., the picks in the revised draft would have been vastly different. For example, Jack Johnson, Anze Kopitar, Marc Staal, Martin Hanzal, Tuukka Rask, T.J. Oshie, Andrew Cogliano, Matt Niskanen, Steve Downie, and James Neal would have all been drafted by different teams.

By looking closely at Table 1 above, we can see the players in Table 2 below are the players from the first round of the draft who would have been eligible for designation under the P.D.T. rule and therefore would have started their careers with and played for different teams:

Table 2.

The casual fan, looking at the names from Table 2, would find less recognizable names more plentiful than the recognizable names.

From that same list of names above, the one having interest for Maple Leafs fans would, of course, be Kenndal McArdle. Unfortunately as Kenndal did not go on to have a long or illustrious career in the NHL there are no obvious questions to be asked.

As was the case for the revised Entry Drafts starting in 2000, the revised Entry Draft for 2005 provides many questions for endless speculation, discussion, and debate.