By Zackery Robert
Next we move on down south to the country music capital of the world, and the hosts of the 2023 NHL entry draft, Nashville Tennessee and the Nashville Predators. Formed in 1998 the Predators are a franchise who have never held the number one overall pick before but have had some good players play for their franchise through non first round draft picks.
To start off we will be heading for the first time in this series to the eighth round, this was the last year that the draft went beyond seven rounds and how lucky it did in 2004 for the Predators because at pick 258 in the 8th round Nashville drafted Pekka Rinne. Rinne was a lifetime Nashville Predator goalie and put up the franchise record in wins of 369 and 60 shutouts. He won a Vezina trophy in 2017-2018 and finished out his career in 2021. Rinne was the first Predator to have his jersey retired at the Bridgestone arena on February 24th 2022.
Next we will look at the 2003 draft where the Nashville Predators took original franchise defenseman Shea Weber in the second round pick 49. This was originally the Predators’ third pick of the second round and they sure saved the best for last in that round. Weber would play for the Predators from 2005-2016 and would amass 603 games and 443 points, along with three 20 goal seasons with the club as a defenseman. Weber would make five all star appearances for the Predators between 2009-2016.
Moving on but staying on the blue line we will head 5 years into the future and into the second round at pick 38 where the Predators went on to choose their all star franchise defenseman Roman Josi. Josi has been the face of the franchise over the past handful of years, he has seven seasons of over 50 points and three 60 plus points seasons with last season eclipsing over a point per game for the first time in his career with 96, that is a feat that is not regularly done by a defenseman especially in this new era of the NHL. Josi has one Norris trophy in 2020 and is the current captain of the team and when he hangs up his skates for good he will go down as not only one of the best Swiss players of all time but also arguably the best Nashville Predator.
Now moving to the not so well picked players. First we will head to the final draft of the 20th century where the Preds had the sixth overall pick and selected goalie Brian Finley. Choosing a goalie in the first round is always an immense gamble because it will normally take a goalie a lot longer to develop into a consistent NHL starter and it is the most important position in the game so using a first round pick, and in this case a top ten pick is quite the move. Since the year 2000 there have only been 32 goalies taken in the first round and, not including goalies drafted in the last four seasons, only 10 of those goalies I would consider being a successful first round pick. With that, Finley would not be among those 10 goalies, he has a stat line of 0-2 in four games played in the NHL and only two of which were with the Predators. Considering Finley was taken with the sixth pick this is pretty disappointing for the team, this draft wasn’t too loaded with a bunch of high calibre talent but this pick was quite the disappointment for the Predators.
Next up we will take a look at another goalie drafted in the first round, pick 18, Chet Pickard. Pickard was drafted in the 2008 draft and never played in the NHL, once again drafting a goalie in the first round is always a big gamble which is why you see a majority of goalies getting drafted in the next few rounds after. For Pickard in the early stages of his pro career in the AHL he wasn’t able to get a winning record in any of the parts of three seasons he played in the league going 16-22-4 in his time and in the ECHL he did not fare much better going 29-37-6 in his time in that league. After the end of the 2013-2014 season Pickard took his skills overseas and spent the remainder of his career in the DEL league for three different teams between 2015-2022. It’s always a gamble choosing goalies in the first round and this gamble did not pay off for the Predators.
Finally going away from goalies we will take a look at the last poor draft pick by the Predators during the draft for this article. Looking back at the 2005 draft, the biggest player would be Sidney Crosby no doubt and that is what that class is most remembered for. However there were 29 others picks in that first round and at pick 18 the
Predators went with Ryan Parent. The defender from Saskatchewan was definitely a defence first defenceman. When looking back on his career in the NHL three things will stand out, never playing a game for the Nashville Predators, being traded away from the Predators in 2007 only to be reacquired by the Predators again in 2010, and traded four months later, and then being traded away from Nashville for Peter Forsberg in 2007.
Flash forward to 2023 and you will find the Nashville Predators drafting 15th in this upcoming draft as the hosts. Looking at their top prospects a vast majority of them are forwards with one exception being Yaroslav Askarov in net from the 2020 draft. With that in mind, the best option for the Predators is to draft for the blue line. They’ve lost a couple of their defence through trades and with their best one getting older it is high time for them to be focused on developing their next batch of blue liners for years to come. Nashville has a whopping 13 picks in this upcoming draft including two first round picks. Their full lineup looks like this: 1st, 1st (EDM), 2nd, 2nd (PIT), 3rd, 3rd (TBL), 3rd (SJ), 4th, 4th (TOR), 4th (TBL), 5th, 5th (TBL), 6th. With this amount of picks the Predators can really do some damage. We know that their pick is 15th overall and in that area we have a few good options, David Reinbacher, one of the two best defence prospects in this draft, Mikhail Gulyayev and Dmitriy Simashev.
For more information on the 2023 NHL Draft class be sure to pick up your copy of the comprehensive DraftPro 2023 NHL Draft Guide.