The 2000 class provides Henrik Lundqvist, Ilya Bryzgalov and Roman Cechmanek (or Rick DiPietro). If we start with Grant Fuhr in 1981, we also get fellow Vezina winner John Vanbiesbrouck along with newly minted HHOF honoree Mike Vernon. Not bad, but not the sort of three-strong combos we’re hoping for.Ī few other Hall of Famers do better. Martin Brodeur’s 1990 draft also offers us Felix Potvin, but then it’s probably Trevor Kidd. He could bring along Kirk McLean, but our third option would have to be Craig Billington. We can start our search with some of the all-time greats, like Patrick Roy in 1984. Most years produce at least one worthy name, if not more.
For an extreme example, the 2007 draft produced just four goalies who ever played in the NHL at all, and of those, Scott Darling accounted for 126 of their combined 147 appearances. Like every position, goaltenders end up being very cyclical when it comes to draft years, for reasons I can’t really explain. Granted, even that’s a relatively high bar to clear. In theory, this should be the easiest position to fill, since we only need to find three stars in a given draft year. Let’s build from the net out and see where this takes us. After all, it can’t be that hard to find a bunch of drafts that have that many stars at a given position, right? Huh, interesting, the “ironic foreshadowing” symbol on my dashboard just lit up, I’m sure it’s nothing. That feels like it’s workable without being too daunting. That means three goalies, seven defensemen and five each at center, left wing and right wing.
In the end, I made the call that I want enough players to fill out a full roster, plus a spare. But I also don’t think we want to go too top-heavy – after all, you could make the case that whichever year produced Mario Lemieux or Nicklas Lidstrom is the best one no matter who else was involved, but then we’re just listing the greatest players of the era and nobody’s learning anything.
On the one hand, I don’t think we want to go too deep because then we’re debating the 14th-best left wingers taken in competing years, and neither is a guy you’ve ever heard of. There is one question to figure out before we can start, though: What exactly does it mean to be the “best” draft class for a position? How many guys do we need before we make a call?
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