Yup, the doldrums of summer are still rolling through the land, and hockey content is drying up faster than the Great Salt Lake. So, we’ll plunge into some sweet, sweet, alternative hockey history pathways throughout the week to help bridge the gap until some deals are announced. Today’s pondering revolves around the 2005 NHL Draft. Most hockey fans remember it as the Sidney Crosby draft, for Minnesota Wild fans, it’s the Benoit Pouliet over Carey Price draft.
Following a year without hockey due to the owners locking out the players the 2005 NHL Draft took place on July 30 in Ottawa. Normally, teams have plenty of time to consolidate their draft boards and figure out their selections based on their draft order. Due to the cancelled season, things were a bit more rushed in 2005.
The draft lottery happened on the same day that the new CBA was ratified, July 22. With no previous season to base the draft order on, the NHL and NHLPA came up with a byzantine weighted lottery system that calculated an organization’s recent playoff history and first overall pick selection history. Teams that hadn’t reached the last three playoffs or won any of the last four draft lotteries would receive a total of three balls. If a team had made one playoff series or won one draft lottery over that time they would get two balls. Every other team would receive just one.
The Wild were one of ten teams that had two lottery balls. They defied the odds a bit and landed the number four pick. Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly a deep draft. Crosby was by far the consensus top pick. After that, things got a little cloudy. With just over a week to make their decisions, it’s likely some teams weren’t 100% sure about their picks.
According to news reports published at the time, the Wild were 100% confident of who they were picking. Ranked second by NHL Central Scouting, Benoit Pouliot was coming off of a breakout season with the Sudbury Wolves where he put up 29 goals in 67 games despite spending 102 minutes in the penalty box. At 6’3” and 200 lbs, he was the ideal power forward that general managers have swooned over for decades. That was their guy, and they didn’t hesitate to take him once Bobby Ryan went to Anaheim and Minnesota-native Jack Johnson went to Carolina.
Pouliot spent another season in the OHL, scoring 35 goals in 51 games, before signing his first professional contract and joining the Houston Aeros for their AHL playoff run. The forward acclimated well to the AHL game as he scored 19 goals for the Aeros in 2006-07 and made his NHL debut playing three games for the Wild that season. That number would increase to 11 games the next season in the NHL, but injuries would derail the remainder of his career with Minnesota, and by 2009-10 he was on his way to Montreal in a deal that landed the WIld Guillaume Latendresse.
In a way it completed a cycle for Pouliot. Back in 2005, the Canadiens wanted to draft him as well. Unfortunately, they had the fifth pick, right behind the Wild. With the forward rudely snatched from their grasp, they had to settle with their second choice - goaltender Carey Price. Not a bad consolidation prize.
With Price’s success over the next decade, and Pouliot’s good, but well-traveled career, a lot of revisionist drafts have pondered how things might have changed had the Wild gone with the goaltender instead of Pouliot. To be fair, a lot of those re-drafts have Price going to Carolina at three and Tuukka Rask going fourth to Minnesota. Outside of Crosby, the 2005 draft probably should be known for producing a really good goalie class. Price, Rask, Ben Bishop, Jonathan Quick, Alex Stalock, and Ondrej Pavelec were all selected that year.
As much fun as it is to ruminate on what the Wild could have done with Price in net next for a decade, the fact is, goaltending was the absolute last need they had at the time. They had a pretty good tandem in Dwayne Roloson and Manny Fernandez in Minnesota that season with Josh Harding waiting in the wings. After swapping Rolorson for a first-round pick in 2006, they signed a kid named Niklas Backstrom who had a pretty good run in net for the next seven seasons.
Would Price have been the difference during the playoff exile from 2008-12? Maybe, but it doesn’t mean the Wild would have been better off. They probably would have still been in that middle void between really bad (benefiting from top draft picks) and really good (benefiting from long playoff runs).
What the Wild needed at the time, and what they needed over the next few seasons was offense. So, instead of pondering what would have happened had the Wild drafted Carey Price, the real question should have been, what if they had drafted Anze Kopitar instead?
It would have been a bit off the board as a selection. Despite being the top-ranked European skater by Central Registry prior to the draft, Kopitar was considered a fringe top-ten pick, and it was assumed he would go late in the first round. He eventually went 11th to the Los Angeles Kings, the team he still skates with to this day.
The Wild had a history of dipping into the European talent pool as Marian Gaborik and Mikko Koivu were the first-round selections in their first two years at the draft. Much like Pouliot, he was a big forward with scoring talent. Unlike the player the Wild selected, Kopitar was able to stay healthy and productive once he made the jump to the NHL. Koivu and Kopitar would have made for a great one-two punch down the middle in Minnesota starting in 2006-07.
Add in his defensive skills and he is exactly the type of player that would have benefitted the Wild the most, not only during the regular season, but also in the post-season. He became the player that the Wild had hoped Pouliot would be.
If Kopitar is running around the arena doing his thing, the Wild probably don’t feel the need to sign Zach Parise to a long-term, franchise-altering contract. Perhaps they still do the Ryan Suter deal, but having one 13-year contract to deal with is much easier than having two.
With Kopitar dishing him passes perhaps Gaborik decides to stick around instead of leaving as a free agent in the summer of 2009. Could a Big Three of Gaborik, Kopitar, and Koivu taken the Wild to the Stanley Cup at some point? Who knows, but Kopitar would have given them a better chance than Pouliot or Price would have.