Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2003

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 2003 did not result in any discernible level of advantage or disadvantage.

At this point I’ll rehash the three P.D.T. rules that I applied to the 2003 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.

In what has been called one of the deepest drafts in the history of the NHL Entry Draft, the application of these three simple rules to the NHL Entry Draft for the year 2003 could have dramatically altered the history of the NHL as we know it. Many 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. rules.

Table 1.

There’s so many recognizable names from the original 2003 Entry Draft that a list of the players who had, or are continuing to have. a long and illustrious NHL career would be long. For example, Marc Andre Fleury, Eric Staal, Nathan Norton, Thomas Vanek, Mialn Michalek, Ryan Suter, Braydon Coburn, Dion Phaneuf, Jeff Carter, Dustin Brown, Brent Seabrook, Zach Parise, Ryan Getzlaf, Brent Burns, Ryan Kessler, Mike Richards, and Corey Perry,.

Even though they had traded away their first round pick in the 2003 entry draft, the Maple Leafs would still have had a substantial list of players falling within their P.D.T. from which to choose – Nathan Horton, Jeff Carter, Brent Burns, and Corey Perry. But to be consistent with how the P.D.T. rules have been applied to the other drafts, the assumption will be that the Maple Leafs would have chosen the player within their P.D.T. who went highest in the original entry draft – Nathan Horton.

Again, with two of the top three original picks being designated under the P.D.T., the picks in the revised draft would have been substantially different. For example, Eric Staal, Thomas Vanek, Milan Michalek, Braydon Coburn, Jeff Carter, Zach Parise, Ryan Getzlaf, Brent Burns, Mike Richards, and Corey Perry 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 played for different teams:

Table 2.

The casual fan, looking at the names from Table 2, would be hard=pressed to find more than a couple of less than recognizable names – Hugh Jesslman and Danny Richmond. The rest would certainly stand out.

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

1.      How much of an impact would Nathan Horton have made as Mats Sundin’s right winger?

2.      With Nathan Horton patrolling the right wing on the first line, would the Maple Leafs have felt a need to trade for Phil Kessel?

The answers to these questions will never be known, but they are still Intriguing what-ifs.

As was the case for the revised Entry Drafts for 2000, 2001, and 2002, the revised Entry Draft for 2003 provides many more questions for endless speculation, discussion, and debate.