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Hot start to cool draft Thrashers improved the most by staying put at No. 2Posted: Saturday June 22, 2002 5:16 PM
TORONTO -- There has not been this sort of action among a threesome since Denise Richards, Neve Campbell and Matt Dillon got crazy in a cheap motel room in the otherwise forgettable Wild Things as the Columbus Blue Jackets, Florida Panthers and Atlanta Thrashers performed their own menage-a-trois at an otherwise forgettable NHL draft. When the heavy breathing stopped, all the teams pretty much got what they wanted. On a day devoted to young men in new, itchy suits and avant-garde haircuts, Columbus traded up from the No. 3 spot overall to take Florida’s No. 1 pick and select a power forward-in-waiting, Rick Nash, whose stock recently had eclipsed the previous consensus No. 1, gangly defenseman Jay Bouwmeester. The cost was reasonable enough: The Panthers have the right to flop first rounders next season in a strong draft year, probably moving up a few spots. Atlanta took the goalie it has long needed in Kari Lehtonen, a Finnish phenomenon, and was bought off with two draft picks to ignore Bouwmeester. And the Panthers wound up with a defenseman who, in a perfect world, coach Mike Keenan can toughen up from raw rookie to well-done pro. But the big winner was the team in the middle, the long-suffering Thrashers, who gained ground by standing in place. If Nash had been available with the second pick, a passel of teams, including the Edmonton Oilers, would have handed Atlanta the front-line center it needed. But with Nash gone, Atlanta belatedly addressed the area that had been holding the franchise back and later wheeled one of those draft picks to add a front-line winger (at least by the Thrashers’ standards), Slava Kozlov. Atlanta has been stymied since its embryonic days when it entrusted its goaltending to Damian Rhodes. Rhodes is one of the finest men in the NHL. He also is the most temperamentally unsuitable goalie imaginable to backstop an expansion team. Rhodes didn’t have the mentality of a No. 1 goalie; the prospect of getting bombarded every night playing behind a porous defense did not exactly spur him to new heights. General manager Don Waddell had stockpiled three goalies who could play a little, Milan Hnilicka, Pasi Nurminen, who performed well in the minors in his first year in North America, and minor leaguer Frederic Cassivi, but none had No. 1 written on his resume or embedded in his genes. Lehtonen has it all. "One of our scouts said he was the best amateur goalie he had seen in the past 10 years," said Waddell, an era that would cover the superb junior career of Roberto Luongo and the one season Rick DiPietro, the only goalie ever drafted No. 1, spent at Boston University. If the Thrashers are right about Lehtonen, they have added to a foundation that teetered on the individual brilliance of rookies Dany Heatley and Ilya Kovalchuk. Atlanta will still look to add another forward that can play on its top two lines and a top-four defenseman, a more pressing need now that the Thrashers have finally located a goalie with a pedigree. (Lehtonen likely will play in the AHL this year, to make him familiar with the angles goalies face on the smaller North American ice surface.) Meanwhile, Kozlov will join the two kids on a line as Heatley, the Calder Trophy winner, moves to center. If the price for an erstwhile sniper was minimal, consider that Kozlov had a terrible Achilles' heel injury in his one season in Buffalo and is an unrestricted free agent after next season. Last June, Kozlov had come from Detroit with a first-round draft choice, which turned into the 30th pick in the draft today, a center from Michigan State named Jim Slater, in the Dominik Hasek deal. Pretty nice when you can swap Kozlov and the 30th overall for a Stanley Cup. Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Farber covers the NHL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. |
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