Blue Jackets Jump Two Teams: 2015 Draft Should Serve As a Warning
The Blue Jackets did the most Blue Jacket thing they could do this weekend. After a lousy performance in a 7-0 loss to the Florida Panthers, the team battled and scrapped for a win on Sunday against Ottawa, moving them into 30th overall in the NHL standings.
It can be frustrating as a fan, I’ll be the first to admit that. In fact, when Marchenko scored the OT winner last night, my immediate reaction was to drop my hands to the couch and laugh, because that’s exactly what we should have expected. If you’ve watched this team for more than the last 5-7 years, you know this story.
The team has a history of being brutal all year, only to have a late season push with replacement players vying for jobs, dropping their draft value lower and lower. And it stinks this year, because if you were going to be terrible in any season, this is the one you want to be terrible in.
an OT winner AND a record-breaking goal 🤩
— Columbus Blue Jackets (@BlueJacketsNHL) April 3, 2023
what a way to end the night pic.twitter.com/CHZzUPWhTn
We’ve all been watching Connor Bedard with a keen interest this season, but the thing to remember here is: he isn’t ours, until we make the pick. All along, we should be paying attention to the entire top half of the top-10. And really, knowing Jarmo Kekalainen, we should be looking at other players as well. After all, he’s been known to make some really off the board choices – not the least of which was Pierre-Luc Dubois third overall in 2016.
The last time there was a player of Connor Bedard’s caliber available at the draft was in 2015, when the Edmonton Oilers took Connor McDavid with the first overall pick. This draft is stacking up eerily similar to that one, with a generational talent at the top, followed up by some seriously good blue chip prospects that should become NHLers very soon.
Making comparisons, I don’t think it’s a stretch to line up Adam Fantilli with Jack Eichel. He has that kind of upside, and produced at a similar rate in his draft year – consider him a near lock to go second overall. After those two players, things get a little bit murky. Matvei Michkov may be the best prospect Russia has ever produced. He could be an elite scoring NHL winger the moment he hits the ice in North America … the only problem is, that’s three years away, if at all.
Michkov is so good that I’ll make a statement that may surprise you: he would challenge Connor Bedard for first overall, if he were playing anywhere other than Russia. He might even challenge for first overall if he weren’t signed beyond this season. Still, he’s good enough that with these concerns, he’s still a near-lock for the top-5. Imagine a team taking a player they may never get in the top-5. His pedigree is that strong.
After Michkov – or before, depending on a team’s preference and comfort level with that player – there are a handful of players vying for top-five slots. The most obvious one here is Swedish forward Leo Carlsson, who has drawn comparisons to Mats Sundin at the same age. Like Michkov, Leo is playing professional hockey in Europe, though in the SHL; which has a transfer agreement currently in place with the NHL. Carlsson may be the safest pick made after the top-two of this draft, and for that reason he could go as high as third overall. The only questions here are, can he be a center, and how high is his ceiling? But even if you miss out on these guys…
If you’ve followed the draft really closely, you know all about the top-four this year. They’re all well discussed and each one has massive upside. But, there isn’t a massive drop-off to the next level as we’ve seen in recent years, which gives this draft the potential to be the best we’ve seen in awhile.
Here’s where things really start to get interesting. Zach Benson is a dynamic scoring winger who could become a Johnny Gaudreau or Mitch Marner type of play driver in the NHL. Or, there’s USNTDP center Will Smith, who does everything really well and at his low end, probably still winds up being a top-three center in the NHL; one that can score points and play in all situations.
I get the desire to tank, and am fully on board with the whole fail for Bedard talk. But, even if this team winds up picking as low as sixth, it’s hard to see this being a bad situation. Obviously, picking higher is better, but there is something to be said about playing the season out with some tenacity and being hard to beat. That’s the key ingredient to a winning culture – and these games definitely matter to guys like Kirill Marchenko and Kent Johnson, as they learn to become pros.
The point I wanted to make about taking warning here comes from having a good scouting department. Good scouting staffs find players no matter where they’re picking in the draft, and I’ll stand by our team’s scouting any day of the week. They have managed to find players throughout the draft consistently, and in various rounds. Everyone wants to bring up the misses here, like Sonny Milano or Kerby Rychel … but for each one of those, we can fire back with players taken later in the draft who turned out well, like Oliver Bjorkstrand or Vladislav Gavrikov.
The 2015 draft is again the best example here. Just look at how the top-10 went, and then compare with how each player has produced in the NHL. Their Central Scouting Ranking is the bolded number at the end – we’ll use these for comparisons since they’re an unbiased ranking provided by the league’s scouts.
- Edmonton Oilers, Connor McDavid (843pts, 564gp) (1, North American skaters)
- Buffalo Sabres, Jack Eichel (442pts, 472gp) (2 NA)
- Arizona Coyotes, Dylan Strome (228pts, 349gp) (4 NA)
- Toronto Maple Leafs, Mitch Marner (550pts, 502gp) (6 NA)
- Carolina Hurricanes, Noah Hanifin (D) (236pts, 593gp) (3 NA)
- New Jersey Devils, Pavel Zacha (232pts, 463gp) (8 NA)
- Philadelphia Flyers, Ivan Provorov (D) (214pts, 526gp) (7 NA)
- Columbus Blue Jackets, Zach Werenski (D) (245pts, 416gp) (9 NA)
- San Jose Sharks, Timo Meier (325pts, 467gp) (10 NA)
- Colorado Avalanche, Mikko Rantanen (500pts, 483gp) (1, European skaters)
As you can see, in hindsight, things are far from linear when it comes to drafting. The top-two went as expected, which is exactly what will probably happen this June. The situation has caused Bedard to be a clear #1, and Fantilli to separate himself as the #2. Chances are, Michkov will fall further than #3, even though on a talent scale, he’s a top-2 player in this draft.
But here we are, eight years on … and the third pick from this draft is clearly NOT the third best player taken. In fact, he’s not even in the top-10, and maybe in hindsight, Dylan Strome isn’t even a top-15 player in that draft. This is where your scouting department has to make a wise decision; such as the ones made by Toronto, Columbus (yes, our Blue Jackets), and Colorado here.
Toronto came away with the second most productive player in the entire draft with the fourth overall pick. Colorado takes the third most productive player tenth overall. Columbus gets the draft’s top defenseman eighth overall, and as an aside, Vladislav Gavrikov – taken in the sixth round – sits in the top-40 or so overall of this draft, eight years on. If you could go back and trade Zach Werenski for Dylan Strome, would you make that move?
Scouting makes all the difference. Even sitting at fourth, or fifth, or sixth, or tenth … you can still come away with top end talent if you know what you’re doing. Obviously, we all want Connor Bedard or Adam Fantilli, that’s an ideal world. But, we have to trust the process and keep in mind: the one thing that Jarmo Kekalainen and his staff have done well here, is finding NHL talent.
This year was supposed to be better for this team. They weren’t planning on having a lottery pick, so whatever player they add at the draft in June is only going to bolster a prospect pool that is already one of the best in the league. If, in 5 years’ time, our top line is something like Kent Johnson-Will Smith-Kirill Marchenko, I think we will all look back on this draft in hindsight and see it as a win. Or, maybe we’ll hit the lottery and then some of us can say “I told you so:
Next. Blue Jackets All But Assured Bottom-4 Finish. dark