Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2002

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 P.D.T.

In that previous article, I spelled out the initial misgivings 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 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 below, the application of the P.D.T. to the year 2002 did not result in any discernible level of advantage or disadvantage.

At this point I’ll rehash the P.D.T. rules that I applied to the 2002 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.

A third rule was also applied in an attempt to keep the revised NHL Entry Draft for 2002 as simple as possible:

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.

Once again, amazing how the application of these three simple rules to the NHL Entry Draft for the year 2002 could have dramatically altered the history of the NHL as we know it. Some key players on Cup winning teams simply 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 transpired. The second six columns represent how a revised NHL Entry Draft might have transpired after the application of the P.D.T. rule.

Table 1.

There’s more than a few recognizable names from the original 2002 Entry Draft. For example, Rick Nash, Kari Lehtonen, Jay Bouwmeester, Joffrey Lupul, Alexander Semin, Alexander Steen, Cam Ward, etc.

There is no doubt the Maple Leafs would have designated Rick Nash, who was drafted 1^st overall in the original draft, under their P.D.T. and this designation would have caused many other recognizable names to be drafted by different teams. For example, Kari Lehtonen, Scottie Upshall, Joffrey Lupul, Alexander Semin, Alexander Steen, Cam Ward, Jarret Stoll, and Josh Harding among others.

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:

Table 2.

For the casual fan, it might be a challenge to find more than a few recognizable names from Table 2. But the first two would certainly stand out - Rick Nash and Jay Bouwmeester.

From that same list of names above, the one having the most interest to Leafs fans would, of course, be Rick Nash. The obvious questions:

1.      How much of an impact would Rick Nash have made as Mats Sundin’s left winger?

2.      How much better would the Maple Leafs have been and continue to be with a line comprised of Rick Nash, Jason Spezza, and Phil Kessel? Assuming the trade for Phil Kessel was done…

Intriguing as those questions might be for Leafs fans, the answers will never be known.

As was the case for the revised Entry Drafts for 2000 and 2001, the revised Entry Draft for 2002 provides many more questions for endless speculation, discussion, and debate.