Long-Suffering Newsletter: Please don't grade my draft for at least 15 years
I'm sorry for bringing up Mike Milbury at your family dinner again
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I can remember the first time I watched an NHL Draft on television. It was 2003 and ‘Mad’ Mike Milbury and the New York Islanders were slated to pick 15th overall. I have no recollection on whether or not it was predicted beforehand that the ‘03 Draft Class had a chance to be one of the best in the history of the NHL, but we’re reminded of its aura anytime Dustin Brown or Ryan Getzlaf retires.
The Islanders, of course, did not reap any of the benefits from this legendary draft. ‘Mad' Mike decided to draft Robert Nilsson over Zach Parise in Round 1, Dmitri Chernykh with the selection before Shea Weber went off the board in Round 2 and even their eighth-round pick, Cody Blanshan, ended up being a knife-twist because Tobias Enstrom went immediately after him. Oh, and our other eighth-round pick, Igor Volkov, went right after Dustin Byfuglien.
Every team has draft mistakes and it’s no use going through the whole we could have picked him instead of him! exercise for the most part, but this draft is the exception to the rule. Had the Islanders not had a sociopath steering the ship, the franchise could have had a very different run over the last two decades. There’s an argument to be made that coming up pretty much empty in the 2003 NHL Draft despite having four picks in the first two rounds is one of Milbury’s most underrated failures as general manager.
The only drafted players that made it to the NHL for the Islanders from 2003 were Nilsson (traded to Edmonton for Ryan Smyth), Jeremy Colliton and Chef Bruno Gervais. I guess it could have been worse. We could have drafted Hugh Jessiman with the No. 12 overall pick.
In a fun twist of fate, the Islanders did end up with plenty of 2003 players — including Parise, of course — later on in life. Jaroslav Halak and Matt Moulson were ninth-round picks. Dylan Reese was a seventh-round pick by the Rangers. Six-game legend Mark Flood was taken 188th by Montreal. Nate Thompson was picked immediately after Gervais in the sixth round. Colin McDonald was a second-rounder. And, believe it or not, the Isles had five different first-rounders play for them: Thomas Vanek, Braydon Coburn, Steve Bernier, Nilsson and Parise.
The point is that we have no fucking idea how any team will be impacted by any draft until years later.
The Islanders objectively did a terrible job in 2003 and paid for it for years, but at the time we had no idea that Evgeny Tunik wasn’t going to be Patrice Bergeron. We found out later that the Isles would have been better off with Bergeron instead of Tunik, but at the time they both were just second-round picks that nobody knew.
By all accounts, the 2023 NHL Draft is about as deep as they come. There’s 2003 potential here, Friedge. The Islanders don’t pick until the middle of the second round and none of us will have ever heard of the teenager they pick with that selection, but there will be plenty of analysis written about him, the team’s draft overall and what grade the organization gets. But the important thing to remember is nobody knows a thing.
The 2003 Draft impacted the Islanders in a lot of ways, most of them bad, but it also put this team on a path to Ryan Smyth, the No. 1 overall pick in 2009 and Lou Lamoriello righting a wrong nearly two decades in the making.
I don’t think anybody had that in their Draft Grades column.
Full Circle with Josh Bailey
Speaking of NHL Drafts, I was one of the lucky ones that was at the 2008 NHL Draft Party at Nassau Coliseum. That year the Islanders traded down twice to select Josh Bailey with the ninth-overall pick. The selection was booed.
Fifteen years late, Bailey is second in the 2008 Draft Class in games played, fifth in goals, seventh in points and seventh in assists. I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I’m also sure he leads that pack in extra passes, getting boo’d by his own fans and songs inspired.
Bailey’s Islander career has been long and winding, but he’s persevered and provided us — the fans that boo’d him on the day he was drafted — with some of the best moments in our sporting lives. Game 1 to the Island. The Jarry misplay in Game 5 of the 2021 run. Bailey was magic in the playoffs. He tallied 50 points in 71 career postseason contests to date. Thank you, Josh.
The journey from rushed prospect that was vilified by his own fanbase to a playoff icon should earn Bailey the type of sendoff that Islander fans do so well. He should hear his song.
But sport is cruel and a proper Islander Goodbye for Josh Bailey is now almost certainly not going to happen.
And in an appropriately weird Bailey-ian twist, the one-thousand-gamer’s Isles’ career could end the same way it started. At a draft with his fans yelling at him to get off their team.
The sad truth is that the fans have a point this time around. The Isles need to get Bailey’s contract off the books if they want to take another shot at this thing with a core that he helped galvanize.
As things stand now, with Bailey’s contract on the books, the Islanders are stuck in the mud. They’d still have enough space to bring back Semyon Varlamov, Zach Parise and Oliver Wahlstrom, but that wouldn’t move the needle enough to reinvigorate a fanbase that wants to see this team continue to fight the good fight.
But if Bailey is bought out or, more ideally, the team is able to trade his full contract elsewhere, the possibilities start to become a lot more tempting. The Isles could get to around $11 million in cap space with some minor gymnastics. You put aside half of that for Parise, Varlamov and Wahlstrom and you’re left with $5.5 million to address a couple of needs — namely a right-shot defenseman and a scoring winger (or Pierre Engvall).
Whether or not that is enough money to get both of those holes filled remains to be seen, but it certainly allows them to at least take care of one appropriately and affords them flexibility to figure out the rest by trying some stuff (like go after Torey Krug apparently?).
It feels almost sadly prophetic to say it all these years and memories later, but we need to get Josh Bailey off the Islanders.
The definitiveness and finality of that last sentence ...I don’t disagree of course but 😩