Ek's note: Despite living in Vancouver, British Columbia his entire life, Trevor Shackles has been following the Ottawa Senators ever since he was little. He has been writing about hockey since the end of 2013, and about the Senators since the fall of 2014. He was previously with SB Nation's Silver Seven Sens for almost three years and was briefly with Fansided's Senshot prior to that, plus his podcast The Cost Per Pointcast has been around since June 2016. We are excited to have him be a part of the Hockeybuzz community!
The Senators obviously didn't get the top-3 pick that they wanted due to the draft lottery.
There is a clear top-3 in the draft with Rasmus Dahlin, Andrei Svechnikov, and Filip Zadina, so dropping to 4th definitely hurt. However, the good thing for the Senators is that they have plenty of options with that pick (and the 22nd overall pick, to a lesser extent).
I wrote about this at Silver Seven Sens recently, but there
seems to be a consensus that puts 4-9 as the next cohort of prospects, and there is another drop-off after that.
Since Ottawa is at the top of that cohort, there are many different ways they can approach this draft.
For starters, we can always hope that neither Montreal nor Carolina takes Zadina, which would make things pretty easy for Dorion and the scouting staff. The more likely scenario though is that they get to decide who to take between Brady Tkachuk, Adam Boqvist, Oliver Wahlstrom, Evan Bouchard, Quinn Hughes, and Noah Dobson. Tkachuk seems like the player most often listed at 4th, but Wahlstrom put up incredible numbers in the USHL (45 points in 26 games), and I’d be pretty happy with any one of the four defensemen as well.
If Ottawa wants a physical winger who is seen as more of a safe pick with a reasonable ceiling, then they can take Tkachuk. If they want to go for the player with the highest offensive ceiling, then they can take Wahlstrom, as his points per game (1.73) are much better than Clayton Keller (1.61), Kyle Connor (1.43), and Matthew Tkachuk (1.38) when they were his age. The knock on him has always been his defensive play though, and the Senators don’t seem like an organization that likes to take forwards who are bad in their own end.
And if they want to add another blue-chip defense prospect (who are much more volatile and harder to project), then it looks like there are a lot of quality options. Adam Boqvist has said that he idolized Erik Karlsson growing up, and he is a similarly smaller right-shot Swedish defenseman that had almost a point per game in the SuperElit league, just like Karlsson did. Evan Bouchard was first amongst defensemen in points in the OHL with 87, and Noah Dobson was also up there in points, with his 69 putting him tied for 2nd in the QMJHL.
Quinn Hughes is a late 1999 birthday and has already played a season in College, and his 29 points in 37 games are nothing to scoff at for a freshman. Overall, these four defensemen all look like they have good offensive ability, so I don’t think Ottawa would be drafting a “safe” stay-at-home player if they decided to go the defensive route with their first pick.
Then there’s also the possibility that the Senators do something that I advocated for in my Silver Seven Sens article: trading down in order to get another late first round pick, or potentially even more. The New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks, and Detroit Red Wings all have picks in the top-9 plus another first round pick, so if one of those teams wants to move up to 4th overall, a deal could be made.
Considering Ottawa rarely ever trades
down, I don’t expect it to happen, but it’s at least a possibility.
It’s obviously less than ideal that the Senators couldn’t get a top-3 pick, but if anything, it just makes the upcoming draft more intriguing, because we have no idea what they are going to do. The most obvious answer would be to draft Tkachuk, and I could definitely see that happening. But at the same time, they might really like one of the defensemen more than the rest, and it’s not as if the Senators defense corps is set for the foreseeable future.
Whether they luck into getting Zadina, draft the safe player in Tkachuk, go “big” with Wahlstrom, draft one of the four defensemen, or move down several spots, there are plenty of options for Dorion. I’m always interested to see how the draft goes, but this year it will be a particularly must-watch event.
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