The NHL is preparing for its final traditional draft, a draft with all teams in the same arena to make the selections.
Every year, teams come out hoping to have drafted at least three players who will play in the NHL one day. Teams like the Canadiens, on the other hand, come out hoping to have found the player who will complete the rebuild.
At the Panthers, we took a completely different approach. Even though the draft was important to general manager Bill Zito, he clearly didn’t have time to wait for his drafted prospects to develop to build a team worthy of quickly winning the Stanley Cup.
In fact, of all the players drafted by the Panthers since his arrival in 2020, Anton Lundell is the only one who currently has an NHL career.
A waste of time?
Teams that draft early have the privilege of choosing the best players available. These are teams that are struggling and have virtually no chance of winning a Stanley Cup in the near future.
But for others, the draft is almost a trip to the casino. We try to find the machine that will pay the most, without knowing if we have the right one in front of us. We hope, but we have no certainty that this will be the case.
In short, in hockey, everything is based on draft projections, but honestly there are so many imponderables that there are no guarantees.
Wait for the right moment
The draft therefore exists to fill the bank of players which is necessary for each formation. But for Bill Zito, the value of a player is much easier to assess when said player plays in another formation.
Sam Bennett and Brandon Montour are good examples. In April 2021, within two days of each other, the Panthers GM acquired (from the Sabres) Montour for a third-round pick (imagine) and Bennett (from the Flames) for Emil Heineman and a second-round pick .
Obviously, the Sabers wanted to help Bill Zito and that’s why on July 24, 2024, they decided to give him Sam Reinhart for Devon Levi and a first round pick in 2022.
If these three players are not acquired by the Panthers in 2021 and Bill Zito decides to wait for the young players he drafts to develop, there is no way he will win the Stanley Cup this year.
A good base
Bill Zito’s way of building is very impressive. The only players who are still present since his arrival in Florida are Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekbald and Sergei Bobrovsky. All other players in his organization were acquired via trade, waivers and the unrestricted free agent market.
For him, it is much more important and much easier to evaluate the talent and especially the character of a player who is already at the professional level, whether in the American League or the NHL, than to evaluate a player who is only 17 or 18 years old.
This approach is not really one that NHL organizations advocate and it will be interesting to see if other teams will be tempted to copy the Panthers.
