Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2011

In my previous article (How to Rectify the NHL Draft Lottery) I detailed 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 initial misgivings I had with my proposal – that the NHL’s Canadian teams would be bestowed an unfair advantage because of their proximity to large amateur hockey leagues and that the NHL’s U.S. teams would be unfairly penalized 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 2011 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 2011 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.

With 2011 being another banner year for talent in the Entry Draft, the application of the three simple rules above may have altered the history of the NHL as we know it. A few good players would have gone to different teams and helped build them into solid contenders and perhaps eventual Cup winning teams.

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.

Even though it is a relatively recent draft, there are more than a few recognizable names from the original 2011 Entry Draft. For example, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Gabriel Landeskog, Jonathan Huberdeau, Adam Larsson, Ryan Strome, Mika Zibanejad, Mark Scheifele, Sean Couturier, Dougie Hamilton, and J.T. Miller.

Year 2011 was a rare year when the Maple Leafs did not trade away their 1^st round draft pick. Via designation of their P.D.T., the Maple Leafs would still have been able to secure a player who is turning out to be a very serviceable NHL player in Ryan Strome.

With three of the top five original picks being designated under the P.D.T., the picks in the revised draft would have been different. For example, Gabriel Landeskog, Adam Larsson, Mika Zibanejad, Mark Scheifele, and Dougie Hamilton 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 the list about evenly split between 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 Ryan Strome. The obvious question:

1.      Would the Maple Leafs have converted Ryan Strome to a winger as he would have been behind Jason Spezza, Steven Stamkos, and John Tavares at the centre position?

2. Or would the Maple Leafs have began trading off centres to fill other holes as they would have been developing a bit of a backlog at that position?

As intriguing as these questions are, the answers will never be known.

As was the case for the revised Entry Drafts from the year 2000, the revised Entry Draft for 2011 provides many questions for endless speculation, discussion, and debate.