Colorado Avalanche: Redrafting The 2005 NHL Draft

The Colorado Avalanche have gone through a fair amount of NHL drafts since being introduced to the league in 1995. We won’t go back quite that far and start ten years later instead, when we take a look at players that were drafted each year. Who turned out to be a decent player for the Avalanche and who didn’t? Who could we have had instead?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Today, we can simply look at a past draft and point out which players were worth a pick and which ones were not. For NHL teams at the draft, however, it is a completely different situation.

Mitch Marner is supposed to be the next Patrick Kane, Jack Eichel is America’s best player since Mike Modano and Connor McDavid is supposed to be Sidney Crosby’s successor? All we know is that Kane, Modano and Crosby are all great players that had and still will, in the case of Crosby and Kane, have incredibly great careers. Kane is getting the chance to win his third Stanley Cup, Modano is America’s greatest scorer of all time and Crosby is a member of the Triple Gold Club.

Marner, Eichel and McDavid, however, have not really achieved anything too big yet. Still, they will likely be the “safe picks” of the 2015 NHL Entry Draft. It gets harder and harder to find real gems, the farther the draft advances. As we wait to see who the Avalanche are convinced of this year, we will use our lovely tool that is hindsight and re-draft the 2005 NHL Draft the way we would have liked it to happen.

Eligible to be re-drafted are all players that were drafted after the Avalanches respective pick and before their next pick.

The Avalanche’s 2005 first round pick was traded to the Atlanta Thrashers, so we will jump right into Round 2.

Next: Round 2