Let's Draft Again (2000-2001)

So basically I will start from the 1999-2000 draft all the way to the 2007-2008 draft because in those years I think we made some poor choices. The last two season have been not as bad and I will like to give credit the current scouting team for their excellent work in getting players like Schenn and Kadri. They might not be the best players in the draft but as of now they are two very good prospects. What I will do is i will redraft the seven rounds and instead pick the best player that went soon after the Leafs drafted. There will be times where I will decide to keep the players the Leafs selected due to them being good players and better then ones that followed them.

The 1999-2000 draft was not that bad for the Leafs but they did miss out on a few key players that might have been good pieces to add to the puzzle. Now we will be looking at the 2000-2001 draft and see if we missed any gems in that draft.

**The order of the players is by rounds... so first players is from the 1st round and so on. **

2000

Players We Drafted – Carlo Colaiacovo, Karel Pilar, Brendan Bell, Jay Harrison, Nicolas Corbeil, Kyle Wellwood, Maxim Kondratiev, Jaroslav Sklenar, Ivan Kolozvary, Jan Chovan, Tomas Mojzis and Mike Knoepfli

Players We Should Have Drafted – Colby Armstrong, Fedor Tyutin, Tomas Plekanec, Aaron Johnson, Patrick Sharp, Kyle Wellwood (i would keep the fat munchkin), Marek Zidlicky, Jussi Jokinen, Derek Boogaard, Cristobal Huet, Petr Cajanek and Toni Dahlman (he sucked as well but he was better then Mike Knoepfli).

As you can see this revelation is a bit more disturbing then the last one. We missed out on players like Patrick Sharp, Colby Armstrong, Marek Zidlicky and Jussi Jokinen for players we don’t even have on our team anymore. Quite a disappointing draft year for the Maple Leafs considering the amount of picks we had.

It certainly would have been much more interesting if we had that many picks in this year’s draft with the proper scouting team. It’s sad that we wasted so many draft opportunities on pathetic picks if you want to put it nicely. There are some nice forwards that we missed out on that might still have been on our team right now and helped us in the past few years.