Why was Henrik Lundqvist drafted so late?

[Rapsfan]

205th overall? Really? How did not a single soul see him as a potentially NHL worthy goalie at the time? How come almost everyone passed up on him? What made it very lacking?

Click to read more...

 

[Michael Farkas]

It's the same way that most other goalie gets drafted late, especially first-time eligibles from European junior leagues.

It's really all about the draft process. You have teams that split their list up into skaters and goalies, some have it as all one list. And you go in with, ya know, 100 names...110. Some teams go to 120. Some teams in weaker drafts might only come in with 80, 85.

Usually that's plenty. I think in 2020 or 2021, I had some scouts tell me that they ran out of names. Which usually means you have a fairly weak draft and a lot of overlap, even from the area scouts.

Anyway...depending on how you set yourself up and how your big board is going, towards the end sometimes the later picks are either given to a particular scout to choose a guy from his area...or a guy who has a passion pick that maybe one of your crossover guys likes or whatever...guys who really know their area (think Hakan Andersson in Detroit) basically get free reign to make a pick because they have the clout.

In the case of Lundqvist, it just came down to one of their area guys (Rockstrom?) really liking Lundqvist. I think he had him as his top European goalie or top Euro junior goalie or some such...and some other guys that saw him didn't like him very much (athleticism, glove hand, sub-6')...the area scout ended up winning out with GM Maloney (who had no idea who Lundqvist was) and it eventually worked out aces...

 

[Crosby2010]

The draft is a crapshoot when it comes to goalies. Fleury went #1 in 2003 and that proved to be quite legit. He turned out to be great. But it normally doesn't work out that way. Here is a good example. Start with the 1996 draft

1996 draft 1st round goalies:
23rd Craig Hillier - never played in the NHL

1997 1st round:
4th Luongo - obviously panned out
21st Noronen - played in 71 NHL games
24th Damphousse - played in 6 NHL games

1998 1st round:
14th Desrochers - played in 11 NHL games
15th Chouinard - played in 1 NHL game
.....................
139th Raycroft - played in 280 NHL games. Won the Calder, finished 5th in Vezina voting in 2004

1999 1st round:
6th Brian Finley - played in 4 NHL games
22nd Maxime Ouellet - played in 12 NHL games
27 Ari Ahonen - never played in NHL
.....................
138th Ryan Miller - Won a Vezina, probably could get into the Hall of Very Good. Played in a gold medal game, and played in 796 NHL games

2000 1st round:
1st Rick DiPietro - Never lived up to expectations.
9th Brent Krahn - never played in NHL
..............
171 Roman Cechmanek - Was not a playoff goalie, but was good in the regular season while he lasted
205 Lundqvist - Deservingly in the Hall of Fame


Another draft right after this was 2001. 4 goalies drafted in the 1st round. Pascal Leclaire was alright, but only played in 173 games and was maybe a starter for one season. Dan Blackburn might have been pretty good if not for injuries. But the other two you've probably never heard of. Meanwhile, Craig Anderson was a 3rd rounder, Ray Emery a 4th rounder, Mike Smith a 5th rounder, Cristobal Huet a 7th rounder and even Martin Gerber an 8th rounder.

I guess what I am saying is that more often than not teams are wrong when they draft goalies. They rarely get it right. And everyone was wrong with Lundqvist.

 

[WarriorofTime]

205th overall? Really? How did not a single soul see him as a potentially NHL worthy goalie at the time? How come almost everyone passed up on him? What made it very lacking?

Bad or lack of scouting

 

[GAGLine]

Even after drafting Lundqvist in 2000, the Rangers had no idea what they had with him. They took Dan Blackburn 10th overall in 2001 and Al Montoya 6th overall in 2004.

Blackburn looked promising until an injury forced him to retire. Montoya carved out a backup career with other teams.

In 2005-06, Kevin Weekes was supposed to be the starting goalie, but Henrik won the job and never looked back.

 

[Section 104]

One story on how the Rangers drafted Lundqvist

The incredible saga of how the Rangers lucked into Lundqvist

Two days. That is how long a relatively unknown 18-year-old goaltender from Sweden named Henrik Lundqvist had been sitting in the stands of the Saddledome in Calgary without hearing his name called…

nypost.com

 

[Brodeur]

The NHL Draft can be tough since guys are first time draft eligible at 18. Not everybody's in a position to shine at that age. Goaltending in general can be harder to scout than say a point scoring forward. Most goalies aren't sniffing at an NHL spot until they're 23-24.

Lundqvist was playing in the Swedish junior league whereas Mikael Tellqvist and Stefan Liv (RIP) were a year+ older but had some starts in the senior league. Somebody like Ilya Bryzgalov went in that draft but that was his third time being draft eligible. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year Bryzgalov was promoted to the senior club.

Looking at Central Scouting's list from that year and they had Lundqvist listed at 5'11. So perhaps he grew a little bit post-draft.

Somebody like Steve Mason barely played in his draft year. Apparently Columbus' GM pulled an audible and drafted Mason in the 3rd round due to some input from their goalie scout. Leading up to the draft, the other scouts had barely talked about goalies.

Similarly Scott Wedgewood didn't play much as a backup in 2010. Then he had one notable 70+ save playoff game in the OHL playoffs. That alone seemingly vaulted him from being a late round pick to being a 3rd rounder.

To put it shortly, some teams are making decisions on a very limited sample size.

Ryan Miller was a late round pick since he wasn't playing in a notable league. I forget if Jonathan Quick submitted the paperwork to be eligible in 2004, but he didn't get drafted until he was 19.

I would be curious if there was video of Lundqvist from around that time. The butterfly was just becoming the standard by the late 90's. Lundqvist of the late 2000s might look like a completely different guy than him as a teenager in the late 90's. There's some clips from the late 90's drafts and the goalies look so clunky compared to the teenagers today.

As a beer leaguer I can attest on the how much better the pads got between say 1995 to 2005.

 

[Crosby2010]

Curtis Joseph was never drafted. Ed Belfour was never drafted. Brodeur was drafted 20th overall, but even then they picked Trevor Kidd and Felix Potvin on the WJC team ahead of him. And let's not forget the highest goalie drafted for the longest time was John Davidson in 1973 at 5th overall. I am not sure what it is they saw in him, but either way it wasn't until Luongo who went 4th overall that a goalie went higher. Davidson didn't have a great career, was a mediocre goalie.

Sometimes the scouts can hit it out of the park, but Luongo and Fleury very much so looked like cant miss prospects in net. They both looked like they could play the position excellent. And they did. Carey Price at 5th overall is another one they got right. Hard to miss him too.

But its a crapshoot. The best goalies in the NHL weren't discovered right away either. Vasi was 19th overall, so that's pretty good. Bobrovsky was never drafted, Shesterkin was 118th overall, Hellebuyck was 130th.

 

[Brodeur]

Since the OP is presumably a basketball fan, one thought was that there was a time where NBA teams would pass on high school players because scouts had a harder time gauging whether or not a guy was just a big fish in a small pond.

Minnesota took Kevin Garnett out of high school in 1995 with a high pick which was unusual at the time. Rasheed Wallace was taken with the pick before and he was 20 with a couple years of college.

Timberwolves GM Kevin McHale later admitted something to the effect that he wasn't prepared to use a 1996 1st rounder on another high schooler so that was one reason they passed on Kobe Bryant. Kobe dropped to #13 since teams opted for guys with more exposure against higher competition.

I've attended a few NHL drafts in person and sometimes I'm shocked how young and physically immature most of the prospects are. It might be a fun conversation to have with a scout to see how much physical development happens for goalies as they leave their teenage years. I always kinda laugh during the World Juniors when many posters act surprised when the goaltending isn't close to NHL caliber.

 

[sr edler]

Frölunda had a window there where they cooked a bunch of decent players. Brother Joel (3rd rounder), Jens Karlsson (15th overall), Magnus Kahnberg (7th rounder), Jari Tolsa (4th rounder), Christian Bäckman (24th overall).

Bäckman was probably the best of above mentioned players, but Jens Karlsson highest picked one from an NHL perspective. You have to ask the Kings scouts what they saw in Karlsson, but he wasn't a bad player at the SHL level, but his 138 PIMs in juniors probably helped him look more gritty than he actually was.

 

[sr edler]

Sometimes what people do in their teens doesn't translate very well to adulthood. Sometimes what people don't do in their teens have no real bearing on their adulthood.

 

[Yozhik v tumane]

I can remember young Lundqvist rising to prominence in the SHL, but it would have been after the draft. The Rangers must’ve sensed they’re sitting on a late-round gem prior to the lockout, and iirc Lundqvist was the most heralded player on that NHL-powered Frölunda team that won the 2004-05 SHL championship. But he’d been making head turns at least the year prior, entered the conversation with Stefan Liv for best Swedish goaltender (Tommy Salo’s stock had crashed, not sure if you heard). At least following the SHL, you thought of one of those two.

I do wonder where Lundqvist’s career would have went had he been drafted or traded someplace other than the Rangers. Even rewatching the 2006 Olympics, when he’d taken the Rangers by storm for just a short while, he’s not exactly recognizable by his style as the goaltender he would become. He’s credited the goalie trainer in New York with developing his game: the ass parked deep in the net, positioning at the goal line. He’s not there yet in the finals versus Finland (he’s much more entertaining to watch), and iirc going by his stats during the tournament, it was perhaps only by the finals he posted a truly great performance. His save percentage wasn’t stellar for the tournament, I don’t think.

All’s to say, he showed talent early on, but then put in lots of work, proved his adaptability and received great help on the way of becoming a HHoF goalie.

 

[BraveCanadian]

Cause he's a goalie and no one ever knows how they are gonna turn out.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

was there a goalie coach between the draft and when lundqvist entered the league fully formed five years later who molded him?

 

[sr edler]

I remember it was a really big deal when he made the Rangers as a starter in his rookie season, playing 53 games, particularly as a European goalie, even if he was 23 at the time (which is only a year older than Selänne's rookie season), and even though the competition (for the starting job) was relatively non-murderous (Kevin Weekes). Not even Lehtonen played that many games as a rookie.

I also can't think of a better fit regarding club and personality. I can't think of another Swedish hockey player so overtly in love with camera lenses and big city lights.