Los Angeles, CA—Nervous anticipation. This was a phrase to describe both NHL prospects and NHL fans in advance of the 2025 NHL Draft, which took place Friday and Saturday of the last week of June in Los Angeles.
Around 2pm Friday, I wandered through the lobby of the hotel next door to the Peacock Theater where the draft was to be held starting in a couple of hours. There they were, nervous young men in tight-fitting suits, players hoping for their lives to shortly change, though all knew, and would say, that this is but one day in a much longer journey. Still, they were in tight groups, parents hovering nearby, the dads trying to hide their pride, the moms their nervousness. Sisters and other partners stood there too, looking happy for a chance to get all dressed up in the middle of a Friday afternoon.
The fans were nervous too, not knowing what to expect in this “decentralized” draft format. Would things be the same as drafts where the whole hockey world was present? Would it seem like no one was there, with no team tables filled with GMs, coaches, scouts, and team media personnel? Where were they? In various war rooms at their home facilities.
As soon as the doors to the auditorium opened, many format-based fears were dispelled. The Peacock Theater was aglow with neon-looking lights. A huge screen was illuminated in the center of the stage, with smaller video boards showing NHL crests right and left. To my memory, this was both more intimate and more spectacular than was the set-up in 2010, when the Draft was last held in LA at then-Staples Center and fans sat in the stands, facing each other from across what would be the ice surface were a game being played.
One thing to note is an irony: the team personnel might not be gathered in LA, but many of them will have had to travel to their team headquarters, because scouts don’t live in NHL cities, necessarily. So how much money was saved by this new format?
Gary Bettman has said very clearly that this was not his idea. Fans worried that it wasn’t going to have any presence, especially compared to last year, when the NHL went huge, holding the 2024 Draft at the Sphere in Las Vegas. The League said at the time that there would be no topping this, and that they wouldn’t try, but why go so far as to decentralize?
In the end, what made this 2025 Draft something of a failed effort—at least as far as the live version was concerned—was not the absence of the “draft tables.” It was that the event was way too long, and boring, lacking in information for those in the arena. (I’ll describe this presently.) That had nothing to do with the GMs and staffs not being there. That was more a question of how picks were presented. I left after pick 21 or 22, and I made it home in time to see a few of the final picks. TV was way better than live.
In the auditorium, Commissioner Bettman would announce the next pick, then disappear while a gigantic “countdown clock” ticket down three minutes. Sometimes, the pick was made right at the end of the three minutes. Sometimes there was a silent delay. In the meantime, those three minutes dragged by, broken only by EJ Hradek coming on-screen to talk about the prior prospect. This in about the last minute of the three. He was universally excellent in what he said, but why not also intersperse other video or narrative? As it was, everyone was twiddling their thumbs while they waited out the 270 seconds, or more, until the next pick.
Yet this wasn’t the result of decentralization. This was just boring event presentation. But enough about the show. How about the matter of hockey?
To take the measure of the importance of the draft, let’s have a look at what has happened so far to those draftees from 2022, the year Shane Wright famously glared at the Montreal Canadians, who were supposed by most people’s reckoning to take him with their first overall pick. He dropped to fourth (Seattle) and up until last year, when he finally stuck with their NHL roster, had a bumpy and AHL-centric ride as a pro.
In addition, while first-overall pick Juraj Slafkovsky has played 200 NHL games so far, most of the top ten from 2022 are in the 50-to-80 game range, and past top ten, it’s anybody’s grab bag. Some in the latter picks of Round One have played as few as two or five or eight games. Of the eleven from pick 22 to 32, six have played nary a minute in the NHL yet.
For a longer-scale comparison, how about a look at the last time the Draft was in LA, in 2010? This was the “Taylor versus Tyler” draft—Hall versus Seguin.
Everyone in the top seven has played at least 500 games. One, Jeff Skinner, is over 1,000. Only two in the top 13 have not cracked 100 games, Dylan McIlwrath (93) and Brandon Gormley (58). Everyone in the top round (30 picks) has played in the NHL, though Mark Visentin barely cracked the code, having just one game to his credit in the big show.
In the second round, things drop off. Nearly ten of those 30 players have not played in the league or have just one or a handful of games. In round three, only a dozen players have made the NHL, and only three have significant game action to their credit: Radko Gudas (829), Bryan Rust (638), and Joakim Nordstrom (444).
In other words, almost all of what happened Saturday in LA, when rounds 2-7 were executed, isn’t going to matter nearly as much as it feels like it will from an immediate perspective. So all the whining about the show, and on the other end all the nervous attention and energy, is temporal. Let’s all just relax and see this for what it is.
So what hockey-related questions does everybody come in with in 2025? You know most of them already, namely, Who will go first (Matthew Schaefer)? Will the whole architecture of drafts be changed now that players are able to move freely between the CHL and the US College game? Is this copy-cat league now making their draft picks based on the “imitate Florida” model?
In addition to this, my question: Where are the goalies? In a league where there’s basically no fund of talent to replace the hapless Stuart Skinner on an Oilers team that would gladly take an alternative if they could find one, why aren’t netminders more top of mind as picks are being made?
We all know that goalies are typically not drafted early, let alone first, notable exception Marc-Andre Fleury (2003) aside, and in more distant times, Michel Plasse (1968) and Rick Di Pietro (2000). The thing said over and over, and repeated this year, is that you can’t predict a goalie’s future—there are too many variables, and their skills don’t show truly for too long, like when they get to be 25. The draft is thus not a good place to find yourself a new goalkeeper.
Despite that, two were taken in Round One this year, by Columbus at 20th pick and San Jose at 30th. The latter grabbed Joshua Ravensbergen, from the WHL’s Prince George Cougars, so at least someone who has been scouted in person. The other keeper was taken from the CSKA Red Army Juniors. Will Pyotr Andreayanov be the next Vladislav Tretiak? Ask again somewhere around 2030 or 2032.
Two additional goalies were taken in Round Two, one from Russia and one from one of the Cadillac OHL teams, the London Knights.
So in the end, this year’s NHL Draft was too long and slow-paced in person, more interesting on TV because a panel talked through each pick and the production interspersed interviews with the young men chosen to form hockey’s future. Its decentralization had little to do with the grade it gets, which is somewhere in the B= range.
