Latest news with #NHLEntryDraft
Edmonton Journal
4 days ago
- Sport
- Edmonton Journal
Cowan: Will Canadiens follow Panthers' roster-building blueprint?
Article content Now that the Florida Panthers have been crowned Stanley Cup champs for the second straight season, the focus will switch to the June 27-28 NHL Entry Draft in Los Angeles. There will be no shortage of mock drafts and prospect analysis until then, and Montreal fans will be wondering whether the Canadiens will keep their two first-round picks (Nos. 16 and 17) or look to trade them to fill the second-line centre hole and/or add some experience on defence. The Canadiens hold 10 other picks at the draft — two in the second, three in the third, two in the fourth and one in the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds.
Vancouver Sun
4 days ago
- Sport
- Vancouver Sun
Cowan: Will Canadiens follow Panthers' roster-building blueprint?
Now that the Florida Panthers have been crowned Stanley Cup champs for the second straight season, the focus will switch to the June 27-28 NHL Entry Draft in Los Angeles. There will be no shortage of mock drafts and prospect analysis until then, and Montreal fans will be wondering whether the Canadiens will keep their two first-round picks (Nos. 16 and 17) or look to trade them to fill the second-line centre hole and/or add some experience on defence. The Canadiens hold 10 other picks at the draft — two in the second, three in the third, two in the fourth and one in the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds. 'As somebody that has a long history with the draft, would I like more draft picks right now?' Jeff Gorton, the executive vice-president (hockey operations) asked after the Canadiens were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Washington Capitals . 'You always want more … more swings at it during the draft.' Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Gorton could have accumulated more draft picks if he had traded players eligible to become unrestricted free agents on July 1 — including Jake Evans (who was re-signed), Christian Dvorak , Joel Armia and David Savard (now retired) — but decided to keep them all, figuring they would give the Canadiens a better chance of making the playoffs. Gorton was right and the experience young players gained in the playoffs is something you can't buy. 'If we would have traded some of the players we were talking about trading, I don't think we would have made it,' Gorton said. 'So there's no regrets.' With all that in mind, it's interesting to note that only four Florida players were selected by the Panthers at the draft — all in the first round. Captain Aleksander Barkov was the No. 2 overall pick at the 2013 draft, defenceman Aaron Ekblad was the No. 1 pick in 2014, Anton Lindell was No. 12 in 2020 and Mackie Samoskevich was No. 24 in 2021. Samoskevich only played in four playoff games. Of the other 19 Panthers to play at least one playoff game, 11 were signed as free agents, seven were acquired via trade and one was claimed off waivers. Ten of the 22 Canadiens who played in the playoffs were drafted by Montreal, including four first-rounders: Cole Caufield (15th in 2019), Kaiden Guhle (16th in 2020), Juraj Slafkovsky (first in 2022) and Ivan Demidov (fifth in 2024). Jayden Struble (2019), Oliver Kapanen (2021) and Lane Hutson (2022) were second-round picks, Brendan Gallagher (2010) and Jakub Dobes (2020) were fifth-round picks and Jake Evans (2014) was a seventh-round pick. Nine of the 22 players were acquired through trades — Joel Armia , Nick Suzuki , Josh Anderson , Dvorak, Emil Heineman , Mike Matheson , Alex Newhook , Patrik Laine and Alexandre Carrier (injured Kirby Dach was also acquired by trade). Two players were signed as free agents — Savard and Arber Xhekaj — and Samuel Montembeault was claimed off waivers. There's more than one way to build a Stanley Cup winner, but Panthers GM Bill Zito has advantages when it comes to attracting players to Florida, with warm weather, a winning team and no state income tax. Canadiens GM Kent Hughes, Gorton and head coach Martin St. Louis are working hard to make Montreal an alluring destination and it will be interesting to see what happens on the free-agent market this summer. Zito and Hughes have something in common in that they were both longtime player agents before becoming GMs and can relate well with today's players, which certainly helps. The NHL draft is always a crapshoot, no matter the GM. Evans, the last player the Canadiens selected at the 2014 draft (207th overall), has played 350 regular-season games in the NHL, which is 292 more than the five players Montreal selected ahead of him. Nikita Scherbak , the first-round pick that year (26th overall), played 37 games. Gallagher, drafted 147th overall, has played 834 NHL games, which is 629 more than fellow 2010 pick Jarred Tinordi (22nd overall). Zito has drafted 33 players since becoming GM of the Panthers in 2020, but only five have played in the NHL so far. The Panthers haven't had a first-round pick in each of the last three years and don't have one this year or the next two years. Samoskevich is the only player from the last four Florida drafts to play for the Panthers. Only one of the six players former Panthers GM Dale Tallon selected at the 2018 draft made it to the NHL, with first-round pick Grigori Denisenko (15th) playing 33 games. There's a risk when it comes to trading first-round picks and it's still too early to make a final determination if Hughes made a mistake when he traded a first-rounder in 2022 for Dach (Chicago took centre Frank Nazar with the 13th pick) and another one in 2023 for Newhook (Colorado took defenceman Mikhail Gulyayev with the 31st pick) . But after making the playoffs in Year 3 of a rebuild, it's worth the Canadiens taking a risk again this year.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Bruins among teams who met with center expected to be drafted high
The Bruins have been doing their homework on prospects as the NHL Entry Draft approaches. Boston has the No. 7 pick and has been linked in mock drafts to Jake O'Brien (OHL) and Brady Martin (OHL) — both of which were present during the NHL Combine. Advertisement Martin confirmed to reporters that the Bruins were among the teams to take him out to dinner. The others were the Utah Mammoth, Nashville Predators and the Philadelphia Flyers — all who have higher picks in the draft than Boston. The Bruins go into the draft with a need for center depth. And Martin could certainly fill that void. A 6-foot center, Martin showed off his skills for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds during the 2024-25 Ontario Hockey League season when he amassed 33 goals and 39 assists for 72 points. The 18-year-old, who revealed Tom Wilson and Sam Bennett as two players he looks up to, isn't afraid to be physical and throw his weight around near the boards and in puck battles — something the Bruins have been missing. Advertisement But Martin's skating could use some work. However, he could develop into a Swiss Army Knife-type player the Bruins need, and many scouts believe he's the type of player teams need if they want to make a lengthy Stanley Cup Playoffs run. More Bruins content Read the original article on MassLive.
New York Times
12-06-2025
- Business
- New York Times
What is the trade value of Vancouver's 2025 first-round NHL Draft pick?
The Vancouver Canucks intend to swing the bat this offseason. The roster needs a significant freshening up after a dismal, drama-plagued campaign saw the club miss the Stanley Cup playoffs and trade their top centre in-season. The franchise sits at a major fork in the road with an underachieving core group that will enter next season with a lot to prove, and surrounded by a ton of uncertainty about its future. Advertisement Fireworks shouldn't just be expected to pop off above Griffiths Way this summer; they're almost certainly required if this hockey club is going to protect its future and salvage an era of Canucks hockey that once seemed so promising. In considering Vancouver's options this offseason, one asset looms especially large as potential trade asset weaponry: the club's 2025 first-round pick, which sits at No. 15 in the draft order. Given the club's short-term priorities and their Les Snead-like organizational track record, the No. 15 pick feels like a gimme to be dealt before Vancouver makes a selection at the decentralized 2025 NHL Entry Draft, to be held in Los Angeles June 27-28. That is why, in a recent The Athletic staff mock draft, we just projected a trade rather than have Vancouver make a draft selection. Given the widespread expectation — held both by us and the industry at large — that Vancouver is more likely than not to utilize the pick to bolster their roster, we figured we'd best give the buying power of this central asset more thought and attention. We built a data set, based on 10 years' worth of draft trades, to try and enhance our understanding of how valuable a middle-of-the-order first-round pick on the trade market has been, historically. So what should Vancouver be able to acquire with their first-round pick? First-round picks move relatively frequently on the NHL trade market. They're a standard form of currency, the de facto coin of the realm, utilized as a major or major secondary asset in all sorts of trades. For our purposes, we want to set up parameters in parsing the history of NHL trades that are roughly analogous to the Canucks' situation while also having a big enough data set to create some meaningful takeaways from this exercise. In order to try and get some sense of what the No. 15 pick should be worth on the trade market, we've decided to look at NHL trades over the past 10 years that prominently featured first-round picks between 11th and 20th. We wanted to cast something of a wider net downstream of the 15th selection while keeping the parameter really tight as the draft order inches closer to the top 10. Advertisement This is because expected draft value typically falls very quickly at the outset of the NHL Entry Draft and then flattens out somewhat. As a result, the value of the 10th pick tells us marginally less about what we can expect the value of the 15th than the value of the 20th pick, given expected draft pick value. We also wanted to exclude certain types of transactions for the sake of simplicity, and to keep this exercise as straightforward and true to life as possible to the situation that Vancouver finds itself in ahead of the 2025 NHL Entry Draft. For example, if Vancouver moves their pick, it's going to be to acquire win-now help. As such, we're not quite as interested in the exchange value of the No. 15 pick from the perspective of trading down at the NHL Entry Draft, to maximize aggregate draft capital. Trades that don't feature an active NHL-level player (or promising prospect) won't be included in our data set as a result. There are a couple of other sorts of deals that we're going to exclude here. Somewhat frequently, picks in this range of the first round are moved as part of deals at the trade deadline that fall into a classic 'buyers chasing playoff success' pattern that we often see from NHL teams. If Vancouver moves their pick, it won't be in this type of deal. And anyway, the trade value of win-now players at the NHL trade deadline is usually inflated, and considering them here doesn't really help us understand what teams would part with in the weeks leading up to the draft to acquire the 15th selection. Deals of this sort, or deals where the pick was acquired 12 months (or more) ahead of time, have been excluded from this sample. There is one more somewhat common variety of trade that pops up when you analyze the recent history of mid-first-round draft picks: the in-season trade that doesn't really fall into the classic trade deadline buy/sell bucket. Advertisement Usually, these sorts of deals occur in midseason and involve a player who either has term remaining on their deal, or are otherwise viewed by the team acquiring them as 'long-term fits.' The 2023 No. 17 pick that moved twice, for example, from the New York Islanders to the Canucks and then from Vancouver to Detroit while as the principal asset that sent Bo Horvat to Long Island and Filip Hronek to Vancouver, are two examples of this sort of trade. For now, we'll also exclude this variety of deal from our analysis. In-season trades necessarily are governed by different dynamics, given the relative dearth of teams with cap space during the campaign, and we're really focused on trying to get a better feel for the purchasing power of Vancouver's 2025 pick in the period leading up to and during the NHL Entry Draft itself. With those qualifiers out of the way, we're left with nine examples of pre-draft trades that included mid-first-round picks based on our definition and returned active players ahead of or during the NHL Entry Draft: Now that we've laid out our data set, let's go over some key takeaways to be aware of in evaluating the exchange value of picks like Vancouver's 2025 first-rounder. The first thing that jumps off the page when we consider these nine trades and the patterns that exist within this data set is that in every single relevant, comparable deal the team acquiring the more established, proven player had to include additional assets beyond the mid-first-round pick in the trade. A pick in the middle of the first-round draft order can serve as the centrepiece asset of a trade for a good young player and often has over the past decade, but over the past 10 years, we haven't seen a pick within range of Vancouver's No. 15 selection be utilized straight up to acquire a proven commodity NHL-level talent. While there isn't much in the way of a clear positional trend that we can pick out of this data set — there are several prime aged forwards, and several good young defenders that were acquired for packages built largely around mid first-round picks in our sample of trades — it seems notable that the only nominal centre in our dataset is Kirby Dach. And at the time of the trade, Dach had just completed his age-21 campaign and had yet to hit more than 10 goals or 30 points in a single season. Advertisement Across the past decade of NHL trade activity, there isn't really an example of a team trading an asset like Vancouver's 2025 pick and returning an established centre in the transaction. Given that a 'top two-line centre' is the Canucks' greatest need this offseason, that isn't an especially promising historical truth. In all likelihood, if history is any guide, the No. 15 pick won't be sufficient to land the centre ice help that Vancouver craves this summer. Across our data set, there are two primary profiles that the primary targets acquired by teams hawking mid-first-round picks on the trade market fit into. The first profile is the young up-and-coming player who has usually played through their entry-level contract. This is a label that rather neatly matches nearly half of the main target players in our dataset (Reinhart, Dach, Romanov, Hamilton). The second profile that pops up in these deals is the more obviously established, about-to-be-extension-eligible player in their mid-20s. This label applies neatly to the four remaining names in our data set (Lucic, Trouba, Ristolainen and Fiala). In all of these cases, it had become apparent that the team in question would have difficulty retaining the player for personal reasons or cap/financial ones, necessitating something of a hard pivot by their current team. With both profiles, it seems, cap and financial dynamics — and the pressure point of either negotiating a second contract, or buying unrestricted free agent years when a player is about to become eligible to hit the open market — rather clearly seem to shape which players tend to move in these sorts of trades. There's a lesson in that, perhaps, in that it might help us understand which sorts of players might be available to Vancouver in a trade involving the Canucks' 2025 first-round pick in the weeks ahead. A player like Minnesota Wild centre Marco Rossi, for example, would fit into the category of a player coming off his entry-level deal and in need of a significant raise. A player like Anaheim Ducks forward Trevor Zegras or Dallas Stars winger Jason Robertson, on the other hand, would fit in the latter category of a player approaching extension eligibility and the age at which NHL players become eligible for unrestricted free agency. Finally, we have one last player profile that doesn't fit neatly into the other obvious categories, the sore thumb trade in our sample: the Kasperi Kapanen deal. Kapanen was 23 years old at the time of this trade and one full season into a second contract bridge deal when the Pittsburgh Penguins reacquired him from the Toronto Maple Leafs in late August of 2020. The date there tells the entire story: Kapanen's bridge deal was signed in a world where the Maple Leafs and general manager Kyle Dubas would've reasonably expected the salary cap to rise on an annual basis, and the trade occurred just a few months after the imposition of the NHL's flat cap era, when it was clear that salary cap austerity would shape the league for the next several seasons. Advertisement The Kapanen deal is, in some ways, a relic of a moment and time. A trade shaped by factors that we aren't likely to see repeated this summer, given the historic cap growth that the NHL is projecting for next season (and for two seasons beyond that). It is nonetheless a trade that sticks out in this data set as especially instructive from a Canucks perspective. The deal was completed, after all, on the Pittsburgh Penguins side by current Canucks president Jim Rutherford during his time as Pittsburgh's general manager. (Top photo of Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
All NHL 25 HUT Fantasy Hockey Updates Through May. 24
Vancouver Canucks 2025 NHL Draft Target: Aidan Park The Vancouver Canucks enter the 2025 NHL Entry Draft with a pick in each round. Leading up to the draft day, we at The Hockey News will be profiling a different prospect who the Canucks could take with each of their picks. Today's prospect is Green Bay Gamblers center Aidan Park, who Vancouver could select 117th overall. 1:28 Now Playing Paused Ad Playing
