2024 NHL Draft full pick-by-pick list, grades and best available: Live updates and Day 2 start time - The Athletic

With the 2024 NHL Draft closing fast — less than two weeks away now — I’ve been studying previous draft results. Second-guessing is always fun and it’s particularly easy because NHL teams are drafting teenagers, and so they’re trying to project what happens when boys become men.

Sometimes, it’s not a linear thing.

Mostly, I was thinking: Is drafting better, worse or the same? When I started covering the NHL full-time, it was a 20-year-old draft. It changed in 1979, adding underage players for the first time, effectively creating a double cohort. It also included all the juniors who’d bolted to the WHA and were suddenly available — Rob Ramage, Mike Gartner, Rick Vaive and others. Ray Bourque went No. 8 and Mark Messier was 48th, two of the seven future Hall of Famers in that class (also Gartner, Michel Goulet, Kevin Lowe, Guy Carbonneau and Glenn Anderson).

Arguably, that draft had more sure things than any draft, before or since, but even in a draft as deep as that one, there were still some missteps along the way. What if Chicago had taken Bourque rather than Keith Brown at No. 7? Or if Winnipeg had taken Goulet instead of Jimmy Mann at 19? If the New York Rangers had taken Brian Propp at 13 instead of Doug Sulliman?

These are all examples of players who immediately went next in the draft and were there for the plucking. Anyway, it got me thinking, what if you could go back in time and allow each team one chance to switch its pick — from the player it chose to the next player off the board? How might that have changed the arc of the franchise?

Full disclosure: What got me down this rabbit role was reviewing some past Calgary Flames drafts, specifically 2011. On the surface, it looked good. Calgary had only five choices that year and all five eventually played some NHL games. That’s rare. One pick was absolutely prescient — Johnny Gaudreau at 104, a complete home run. But it could have been even better if, at 57, instead of taking a defensive prospect, Tyler Wotherspoon, they’d selected the player who was picked immediately just after him.

That was Nikita Kucherov — to the Tampa Bay Lightning. Wotherspoon ended up playing 30 NHL games. Kucherov is a Stanley Cup champion and MVP, and remains one of the most dynamic players in the game today.

If only, right? That’s a dangerous game, but fun and sometimes enlightening, too. So let’s do it for every team, and spoiler alert, my favorite turned out to be Vancouver for reasons you’ll discover below.

One final caveat: By no means is this intended as an exercise with only a single correct answer. I chopped 1,000 words just to get it this length. On the contrary — it’s something that can be debated endlessly, and at length.

Remember, my only rule is you can’t pick a player that was available at some later point in the draft. It’s the player who turned out to be the next man up. Let’s begin.