The title a nod to song from a certain movie, anyways it’s difficult to draft NHL players. NHL teams are tasked with scouting players mostly when they are 16 and 17 years old and have to try and rank what they will be as fully formed adults. Needless to say, it’s not an exact science and a process that ends up with more misses than hits. Our results of making picks alongside the Penguins at their spot in the draft has gone about the same way. Here’s the last decade of fake vs real drafting.
Well, on the plus side at least four out of the five mock picks prior to 2025 that we made played in the NHL last season. That’s better than the Pens ended up with in reality. A player like Hoglander has spun his wheels professionally in recent years (really, he might just need to get out of Vancouver ASAP to benefit his career) and might not be looking to be as proud of a pick as it might have seemed a couple years ago when he produced a 24-goal season. Hoglander’s recent career plateau aside, he worked out a lot better than the actual pick of Sam Poulin did.
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The real Pittsburgh 2020 first round pick got traded in the last minute to Toronto for Kasperi Kapanen. The Maple Leafs ended up using that pick to select forward Rodion Amirov, who sadly passed away in 2023 after battling brain cancer. The Penguins ended up getting 162 games and 82 points (29 goals + 53 assists) out of Kapanen before waiving him in 2023 and seeing him go to St. Louis. Zary, for his part, has 86 points (and some good defensive metrics) in 191 games with Calgary. So I guess there’s a case to be made that the Pens would have been better off in the long run for holding onto their pick depending on what they did with it, but then again they wanted a NHL forward for 2020-22 to help their late-stage contention windows and it ended up not panning out since Kapanen didn’t help push the team that far forward while he was on it, and then was jettisoned as a bad contract to allow more cap space via dropping him for nothing.
2022 isn’t looking to great either for our pick, or for the Penguins after draft+4. Ivan Miroshnichenko has only played 52 career NHL games, mostly as a spare part forward. He has become an excellent AHL player but needs to make a big move soon if he’s going to establish himself. Owen Pickering, well we’ve all spent a lot of time on his case. We remain convinced former Penguins GM Ron Hextall thought/hoped he had found Travis Sanheim 2.0 when he drafted Pickering – unfortunately though, at this point there’s enough evidence to say that he got Temu Sanheim instead. Pickering might go on to play NHL games in a modest role, it looks like he will fall short of his draft day ceiling of a matchup defender that could have played up the lineup.
We have plans for a victory lap in 2023, Matthew Wood scored 17 goals and put up 30 points in the NHL in his draft+3 season with Nashville. That’s the dream development curve from a mid-first round pick these days, gotta see some flashes and pay off fairly early on to indicate a potential real factor/difference-maker. Yager didn’t do much in the AHL, but was called up for a few meaningless games once Winnipeg was eliminated last season. Who knows what that means for the future, some predictive models aren’t too high on Yager’s chances at all right now. That doesn’t truly matter to the Pens now, of course, since they flipped Yager for Rutger McGroarty, who hasn’t yet established himself either.
Victory lap plans might be canceled after seeing the Pens pull Ben Kindel from deep in the weeds. That’s why the pros are pros! However, for his part Eklund had a great 2025-26 in the top Swedish league and a great WJC tournament. He also popped over to the AHL and scored 10 points in nine regular season games, and recorded an assist in one NHL game late last year. Eklund had a very encouraging draft+1 to suggest there’s a real player in there.
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The Pens could have had Eklund at 12, but instead opted to trade down and ended up coming out of the first round with Bill Zonnon and Will Horcoff when the dust settled. It’s not hard to see why Pittsburgh with a lack of talent would want more quantity – it also makes sense that they wouldn’t be interested in drafting two forwards with similarly small frames like Kindel+Eklund and diversify the profile of player they got by adding larger forwards to their prospect portfolio. That reasoning aside, this area of how Zonnon+Horcoff vs. Eklund works out will be worth watching for developments in the way Yager/McGroarty has been a very deep-in-the-weeds type of minor storyline over the past few years.
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For this year’s draft, I’m going to use scouchsim.com on 25% random to predict who was selected in the first 21 picks. This process is inexact for the real world events on Friday night, and obviously can’t predict if Pittsburgh will trade up or down in reality, but is about as good as it’s going to get for a reasonable way to set the stage of what players could be out there at the time of the selection. In our side quest, we’ll simply stick with the 22nd pick and not get too creative.
After running the sim, here were the top ranked players available:
To an extent, I considered all of these names at least momentarily. The trouble with picking in the area of 22nd is that you know there will be a good future NHLer or two available crowded around a handful that won’t amount to much at the top level. Sorting through and deciding what will end up 4+ years from now is the guess work of today, both for us and for teams picking towards the end of the first round.
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NHLe helps as a guide for previous production as projection of how the future unfolds. It loves Tommy Bleyl (12% chance of star outcome of being in the top 15% of WAR/82, and a 64% chance of becoming an NHLer to play in 200 games) as one of the top profiles in the whole draft by this metric. Hurlbert (7% chance of star and 64% becoming an NHL player) ranks highest among the available selections as well, presenting what becomes the two finalists to spell out the thought process. For Bleyl, the question becomes is he going to develop into more of a Axel Sandin-Pellikka or a Calen Addison type of future. It’s a worthy rhetoric to wrestle with. For Hurlbert, it’s more about future position as a center or wing – with a default consensus coming into the draft that he will likely play on the wing as a pro.
In the end, we’ll make Bleyl the official Pensburgh choice, not meant to be predictive of what Pittsburgh will do (we’ll take a stab at that in a full first round mock draft tomorrow). You can check out more on Bleyl from what we wrote earlier in the week. Bleyl’s offensive upside, skating, right shot make him a prospect worth rolling the dice on at this point of the draft. Our fictional prospect pool could use that style of player, as could virtually any real NHL organization that always has a hunger and emphasis on right shot defenders with skill.
