Rewriting The Draft: A Decade Of First-Round 'What-Ifs' for
The 2025 NHL Draft is now just one week away, and for some hockey fans, it's like Christmas in June, waiting to see what shiny new toys they'll get under the tree. In this (admittedly lame) analogy, amateur scouts play the role of Santa Claus. They're making their lists and checking them twice, but unlike the big man in red, figuring out which kids have been “nice” often boils down to little more than best guesses.
A better analogy might be a baseball player who’s praised for batting .300, even though it's a pretty serious failure rate. But hitting a curveball is hard, and 18-year-old hockey players throw plenty of them at scouts. Only some of them have the stuff to continue their amateur excellence in the bigs.
But what if you could go back to each of the last 10 NHL Drafts knowing then what you know now? A little time travel. How different would the Ottawa Senators' first-round picks look compared to the players they selected?
Let’s preface this with the usual disclaimers. This isn’t an all-out attack on the Senators’ scouting performances of the past. Everyone knows you could perform this exercise with all 32 teams and end up wanting to swap out the majority of the picks.
So, strictly for fun and interest's sake, we went back over the last 10 first rounds to see who was still on the table when Ottawa made its decisions.
2015
From the Saint John Sea Dogs, the Senators selected Thomas Chabot 18th overall. Then, from the U.S. National Development Program, they grabbed Colin White at 21. These two were joined at the hip early on. They were drafted together, roommates, and share the exact same birthdate.
In our time travel exercise, though, we’d head to customer service and exchange them for Roope Hintz (Dallas) and Kirill Kaprizov (Minnesota).
Chabot has still had a career worthy of a first-round pick, but White is now out of the NHL, spending most of last season with the AHL’s San Jose Barracuda and set to become a UFA. He’s still a drag on Ottawa’s…
