Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2006

In my previous article (How to Rectify the NHL Draft Lottery) I put forth 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 a P.D.T.

In that previous article, I listed the initial misgivings I had with my proposal – that it would grant an unfair advantage to the NHL’s Canadian teams because of their proximity to large amateur hockey leagues and 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 year 2006 did not result in any discernible level of advantage or disadvantage.

At this point I’ll quickly rehash the three P.D.T. rules that I applied to the 2006 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.

As in each of the previous years, 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 secure their Cups or perhaps might have helped their new teams secure 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.

Once again, there are more than a few recognizable names from the original 2006 Entry Draft. For example, Erik Johnson, Jordan Staal, Jonathan Toews, Nicklas Backstrom, Phil Kessel, Kyle Okposo, Michael Frolik, Bryan Little, Claude Giroux, and Nick Foligno.

With the application of the P.D.T. rule to the 2006 Entry Draft, the Maple Leafs would have fared better than they did in 2005. Chris Stewart turning out to be a very capable NHL player. As the Leafs were drafting in the thirteenth position in the draft and there were only three players who would have been designated under the P.D.T. ahead of them, the Leafs would still have been able to draft a good quality player. In this case, Trevor Lewis.

With only two of the top ten original picks being designated under the P.D.T., the picks in the revised draft would have been slightly different. But what a difference! For example, Jordan Staal, Jonathan Toews, Nicklas Backstrom, Phil Kessel, Kyle Okposo, Michael Frolik, Claude Giroux, and Nick Foligno all would have 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 the list about evenly split between some-what recognizable and less recognizable names.

From that same list of names above, the one having the most interest for Maple Leafs fans would, of course, be Chris Stewart. Unfortunately, even though Chris Stewart has turned out to be a very serviceable NHL player, it seems he would have been a depth addition to the Maple Leafs and not perceptively changed their history.

As was the case for the revised Entry Drafts starting in 2000, the revised Entry Draft for 2006 provides more than a few questions for speculation, discussion, and debate.