Protected Draft Territory - Alternate Draft History for the Year 2000

In an attempt to rectify what I see as the issues with the current NHL Draft Lottery, I cam up with a proposal for each NHL team to be given what I call a Protected Draft Territory or P.D.T. For a better understanding of my proposal, see my previous article (How to Rectify the NHL Draft Lottery).

In the preliminary stages of hashing out my proposal, I initially thought that the P.D.T. would unfairly benefit the Canadian NHL teams – in particular Toronto and Ottawa – because of their proximity to large networks of amateur hockey leagues. It seemed this proximity would allow the Canadian teams to skim off the cream and leave, depending on their particular situation, the U.S. NHL teams either the dregs or nothing from which to draw.

But, surprisingly, as soon as I started looking at the NHL Entry Drafts from the year 2000 onwards and applying the P.D.T., the anticipated unfairness did not materialize as severely as I initially expected.

At this point I should explain the P.D.T. rules that I applied for each 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.

In an attempt to keep the revised NHL Entry Drafts for each year as simple as possible, a third rule was also applied:

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.

Pretty straightforward.

But amazing how the application of these three simple rules to the NHL Entry Drafts starting with the year 2000 could have dramatically altered the history of the NHL as we know it. Key players on some of the Cup winning teams simply might not have been there to help those teams secure their Cups or perhaps might have helped their new teams to secure a Cup.

Without further ado, let’s look at how the application of the P.D.T. to the NHL Entry Draft for the year 2000 could have started to change the history and fortunes of each NHL team.

The table below (Table 1.) 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.

For a casual fan, the recognizable names from the original 2000 Entry Draft might be – Rick DiPietro, Dany Heatley, Marian Gaborik, Rostislav Kiesla, Raffi Torres, Scott Harnell, Ron Hainsey, Brooks Orpik, Alexander Frolov, Anton Volchenkov, Brad Boyes, Steve Ott, Justin Williams, and Niklas Kronwall.

Even with the application of the P.D.T. to this entry draft, by looking at the columns to the right of the “Revised” column, it can be determined that the following players from the list above would still have been drafted by the teams which originally drafted them – Rick DiPietro, Dany Heatley, Marian Gaborik, and Rostislav Kiesla - or the first four picks.

Other names drafted by new teams would have been - Scott Harnell, Ron Hainsey, Alexander Frolov, Anton Volchenkov, Brad Boyes, Steve Ott, and Niklas Kronwall.

Looking more closely at Table 1 above, 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.:

Raffi Torres	L	Toronto	635
Ron Hainsey	D	Boston	741
Brooks Orpik	D	San Jose	770
Krys Kolanos	C	Calgary	149
David Hale	D	Colorado	327
Nathan Smith	C	Edmonton	26
Justin Williams	R	Ottawa	906
Jeff Taffe	C	Minnesota	180
Andy Hilbert	C	Detroit	307

Table 2.

To the same casual fans, the most recognizable names from Table 2 above are Raffi Torres, Brooks Orpik, and Justin Williams.

Just from two of those three names, many interesting questions could be asked as to how the history for their revised draft teams might have changed. For example:

1.  In 2002, does Raffi Torres help the Leafs get past Carolina in the Conference Finals and into the promised land of a Stanley Cup Final and perhaps even a Stanley Cup victory?

2.  Does Justin Williams help Ottawa avoid multiple defeats at the hands of the Leafs in the numerous Battles of Ontario?

3.  Without Justin Williams, does Carolina win the Cup in 2006? Does Los Angeles win multiple Cups in 2012 and 2014?

All questions that we’ll never know the answers to, but interesting to discuss and debate nevertheless.