Since it’s August and we’re in the dog days of our Blackhawks offseason, let’s have a little fun. Last summer we looked at the long game in our Trade Tree Friday series. This year, we’re going to jump into the hypothetical machine and wonder What If each Wednesday this month.
In our first edition, let’s go back to the 2005 NHL Draft and wonder…
What if the Blackhawks had drafted Anze Kopitar?
The Blackhawks approached the 2005 NHL Draft with the seventh overall pick. Chicago had selected a defenseman in the first round in the previous three years — Anton Babchuk (2002), Brent Seabrook (2003) and Cam Barker (2004) — so they were thinking forward this time around.
The top of that draft class felt an awful lot like this year’s draft. The entire world wanted Sidney Crosby, and the Pittsburgh Penguins were at No. 1 for the second time in three years. It was a no-brainer. After Crosby is when things started to get interesting, however.
🙈Chicago watched as Bobby Ryan, Jack Johnson, Benoit Pouliot, Carey Price and Gilbert Brule followed Crosby off the board. When No. 7 was on the clock, the Blackhawks had some options.
Among the names available at that point were Devin Setoguchi, TJ Oshie, Martin Hanzal and Anze Kopitar. The Blackhawks opted to take a fast skater from the US National Development Program and the Universit🅰y of Wisconsin, Jack Skille.
Kopitar lasted three more picks before landing with the Los Angeles Kings at No. 11. And he’s had a wonderful, Hall of Fame-caliber career in LA.
Skille never worked out. He appeared i𒉰n 368 regular-෴season games and scored only 43 goals in the NHL.
Over the years, many Blackhawks fans have looked back at this draft and wondered what if the Blackhawks had selected Kopitar instead of Skille? So let’s try to answer that by playing it forward (literally and figuratively).
After the 2005 draft, Skille went to Wisconsin and scored 13 goals in 41 games as a freshman for the Badgers. There was som🔜e level of hope that he could be an NHL player.
When the Blackhawks approached the draft in 2006, there were a few members of the front office/ownership group that really liked another fast-skating winger named Phil Kessel with the third overall pick. But general manager Dale Tallon was absolutely set that a center was the play, and that Jonathan Toews would become a star. He won that battle with the dissenting voices and Toews went on to have a Hall of Fame cℱareer of his own in Chicago as the longest-tenured captain in Bl🦄ackhawks history.
As the luster came off the rose with Skille after a less-than-stellar sophomore season at Wisconsin, and the Blackhawks winning the lottery to make the first overall pick in 2007, they once again looked to add an offensive threat to the mix and went with Patrick Kane. The rest is history.
But let’s go back to the hypothetical: what if the Blackhawks had taken Kopitar in 2005? If Chicago had a big center in the fold already, there’s a chance those who preferred Kessel to Toews may have won the day a year later. Kessel was in the NHL already immediately following his draft — in Boston — and he scored 11 goals in 70 games in the 2006-07 season.
Which then makes us collectively wonder if the Blackhawks would have won three championships wi𒈔th a roster built around K💎opitar and Kessel instead of Toews and Kane.
I’m glad we can look back now and see three banners and, eventually, banners with 19 and 88 to go with them.
