Hindsight is an amazing thing, and allows us to look back and wonder “what could have been.” Though perfection is attempted, scouting and draft selection isn’t an exact science and sometimes, it doesn’t work out the way teams–or players–intended. For every Patrick Kane, there is a Patrik Stefan.
We’re looking back at the 2005 NHL Draft, which kicked off the salary cap era and ushered in many of the current NHL superstars. The question we’re looking to answer is knowing now what we didn’t know then, how different would this draft look now with the benefit of hindsight?
The readers voted already for the first overall pick. and the results were hardly surprising. With nearly 88% of the vote, Sidney Crosby retained his status as the top pick of the 2005 Draft. Now we move forward to the second pick, where there are a number of strong choices as we re-select all of the ’05 Draft.
To recap how this works:
- We will go through the entire 2005 NHL Draft and have our readers select, through a voting process, who they think should have been taken with the selection.
- Every team will be represented, spanning picks one through thirty. The new selection is chosen by the majority of votes. We will continue this all the way through the 30th–and final pick of the draft.
We are now at the second overall pick, which was held by the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (now the Anaheim Ducks). With their choice, the Ducks selected Bobby Ryan. While Ryan has enjoyed a productive NHL career, there are certainly other names that stand out: Carey Price, Anze Kopitar, Jonathan Quick, Ben Bishop, and Tuukka Rask just to name a few.
With the second pick of the 2005 NHL Draft, who should the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim select? Cast your vote below!
The first paragraph loosely translates to: drafting 18 year olds is a crapshoot.