With a history of terrible draft choices, one pick stands out as the worst selection ever made by the Blue Jackets

The Blue Jackets have made a lot of high draft picks throughout their 26 years in the National Hockey League. Many of those players never really panned out, for a variety of reasons. There is one pick, however, that looked awful right from the start, and we should not have been surprised by the outcome.

In all of my years following the team (I've been here since the very first drop of the puck in 2000), I've seen a lot of opinions on this subject. Some will point to Gilbert Brule, taken 6th overall at the 2005 NHL Draft. I'm always quick to defend that one because he was super talented, they just rushed him into the NHL too quickly and stunted his development.

Others like to throw darts at another player I'll quickly defend (Ryan Murray), who was picked second overall in 2012. He remains the highest player ever selected by the team without trading up in the draft. But, he's another player whose inevitable collapse was easy to see; because injuries never allowed him to become the player he could have.

Others that could make the top of this list include Nikolai Zherdev (4th, 2003), Nikita Filatov (6th, 2008), David Jiricek (6th, 2022), or even Cayden Lindtrom (4th, 2024). Heck, one could even mention that the single worst move this team ever made at the draft was trading the first round pick that became Sean Couturier in 2011. It's hard to refute any of these arguments.

Draft day trades are not the purpose of this article, though. This article is here to point out that in my opinion, the worst draft choice ever made by this team was made in 2004. That summer, the Blue Jackets held the 4th overall pick in their hands. There were some good options on the table.

Power forwards galore in 2004.

The Jackets had drafted Rick Nash in the year prior, so the need for a power forward wasn't too high on their list of priorities. With Andrew Ladd and Blake Wheeler looking like clear candidates at this slot, then-GM Doug MacLean decided to trade down in the draft. He got picks #8 and #59 from the Carolina Hurricanes in exchange for his #4 overall pick.

Then, in what we should only consider par for the course, MacLean and his staff used the 8th overall pick to select...wait for it...a lower-end power forward.

The Blue Jackets dropped 4 spots in the draft, passing up the chance to draft Ladd, or Wheeler; instead choosing to select QMJHL forward Alexandre Picard-the guy MacLean said he wanted all along. Oh no. To this day, this is a decision that I simply cannot justify.

On paper, you can skew this to make a little bit of sense. After all, Picard was coming off of a big breakout season in the QMJHL. He scored 39 goals and 80 points in 69 games, adding 88 penalty minutes into the mix.

We all know how much Doug MacLean valued that old-style hockey. You might call it truculence. Picard was, well, truculent. He was a power forward in every sense of the word.

Picard was never going to be a star in the NHL.

There's just one problem: the guy wasn't that good. This was a case of a player who physically matured at an earlier age, and in reality, he wasn't even young. With a late birthday, Picard turned 19 just months after the Blue Jackets drafted him.

Maybe it's better to go back, compare his 17 year old season's statistics, and work off of that. That season, he scored a modest 14 goals and 29 points in 66 games. Ultimately, that feels like a better projection on where he should have been drafted (ideally, somewhere in the middle rounds).

Scouting has come a long way since then, and so have analytics. I'm sure the hockey math community would have ripped this pick apart at the time. But, even with just the eye test, you could see problems in Picard's game.

Right off the rip, he was not a good skater in any sense of the phrase. He had slow feet, a fairly low straight line top speed, and wasn't terribly agile. In a word, he was clunky. At best, we could have hoped to see him turn into a pesky third line player that could chip in 20 goals and a bunch of penalty minutes.

He never even came close. Picard would never score a single NHL goal. He got into 67 games for his career, registering just 2 assists. In fact, he managed to reach the 20-goal plateau in the AHL only twice in 8 seasons.

Meanwhile, the Hurricanes happily marched to the stage and picked Ladd, who would go on to play 1001 NHL games, scoring 550 points and winning two Stanley Cups. The first of which was on a team that included CBJ castaway Ray Whitney. Ouch.

In hindsight, the obvious pick here might have been Wheeler. He played 1172 NHL games, scoring 943 career points. The Jackets could have used him for a lot of years.

By the way, one last shovel full of dirt for the pile: the other pick the Blue Jackets acquired (pick #59) became Kyle Wharton, a defenseman who wound up in the ECHL just three years later. Woof.

In a long line of wasted draft picks, I will always be of the stance that Picard was the worst choice the Jackets ever made at the NHL Draft. This one just never made any sense.

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