He did according to rumors. There were a ton of really good defensemen that draft, and the Lightning wanted one. There was a rumor at the time that the Lightning had a guy not on most peoples draft boards that they were interested in, because it was possible one of those top dmen wouldn't drop to us, I remember at the time the buzz was that it was Hampus Lindholm. We really thought we were going to get either Trouba, Dumba, Pouliot, or Rielly and it didn't matter which.
When the draft actually went down however, and defenseman after defenseman was selected instead of the higher ranked forwards, including Lindholm, our entire fanbase thought we actually were extremely lucky. It wasn't just Forsberg who had dropped, Grigorenko was a presumed top 3 pick on a lot of boards and had fallen. We were going to draft one of them right?
We were so pissed when that defenseman was Koekkoek, a guy completely out of nowhere.
He ended up re-injuring that shoulder two years later and it de-railed his career. We did the same shit with Brett Connolly who mangled his hand, drafting kids without considering the long term effects from major injuries.
Vasy obviously worked out for us, but he was considered a 2nd round pick too. Our second round picks were all major reaches, Blujus and Hart didn't do anything and were major reaches at the time.
We got Pacquette, Dotchin, and Gusev later that draft, but seems like we've squandered a lot of our early picks over the past decade.