Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2004

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 listed 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 in this article, the application of the P.D.T. to the year 2004 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 2004 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.

After 2003, one of the deepest drafts in the history of the NHL Entry Draft, a little bit of a fall-off in talent for the NHL Entry Draft for the year 2004 would have been expected. But 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.

Regardless of the fact that it wasn't as deep a draft as 2003, there are more than a few recognizable names from the original 2004 Entry Draft. For example, Alex Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Andrew Ladd, Blake Wheeler, Al Montoya, Drew Stafford, Devan Dubnyk, Travis Zajac, Cory Schneider, Jeff Schultz, and Mike Green.

Even though they had, once again, traded away their first round pick in the 2004 Entry Draft, the Maple Leafs would still have been able to secure, via designation of their P.D.T., someone who turned out to be a very serviceable player – Dave Bolland.

With three of the top four original picks being designated under the P.D.T., the picks in the revised draft would have been different. For example, Drew Stafford, Devan Dubnyk, Travis Zajac, and Mike Green 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:

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 interest for Maple Leafs fans would, of course, be Dave Bolland. The obvious question:

1.      Does Dave Bolland provide the depth down the middle, as he did in Chicago, to help the Maple Leafs win a Cup?

As intriguing as that question is, the answer will never be known.

As was the case for the revised Entry Drafts for 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003, the revised Entry Draft for 2004 provides many questions for endless speculation, discussion, and debate.