Philadelphia Flyers general manager Bob Clarke called it
"a potential nightmare for a lot of clubs."
Agent Mark Guy said it could be "a real logjam" and "probably won't look like anything that has happened before."
Two of the most prominent names among the unsigned 2003 draftees are unlikely to reenter: forwards Jeff Carter and Mike Richards.
Both players were selected by the Flyers in the first round, Carter was picked 11th, Richards 24th. Both players are two-time members of Canada's world junior team. In Grand Forks, N.D., in January, Carter made the tournament's first all-star team and Richards captained the squad to the gold medal.
After their junior teams were eliminated in the Ontario Hockey League playoffs last month, Carter and Richards signed American Hockey League contracts and joined the Philadelphia Phantoms, the Flyers' affiliate. The Phantoms advanced to the conference finals with Carter as their leading postseason scorer. The consensus among scouts is that Carter and Richards both could have stepped into the NHL if arenas hadn't gone dark last fall.
Clarke says there's no way he'll allow his organization's two best prospects to fall back into the draft.
"They're both high priorities for us," Clarke said.
"I think that they want to play for us and we definitely want them.
They're going to get the cap – whatever the next [collective agreement] allows for – and there won't be that many details to iron out."
But Clarke says things
will not be so clear-cut for other organizations and their 2003 draftees.
"Whenever we [get] back to business, every GM is going to have a lot of paper on his desk and a lot of contracts to do – veterans and juniors," he says.
"How many of [the 2003 draftees] can get signed really depends on how much time the teams have and how much the GMs have to work with.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/columns/story?id=2062921&num=2