The Habs All-Drafted Team

Eric Duhatschek, on the number of outstanding former Islanders out there:

"One could convincingly argue that the best or second-best player on as many as four NHL teams is an ex-Islander — Zdeno Chara (Ottawa), Bryan McCabe Toronto), Todd Bertuzzi (Vancouver) and Roberto Luongo (Florida)."

That got me thinking - what if the Canadiens had never made a trade and lived by their draft choices alone? So I had a look at the last 20 drafts and came up with this:

Forwards
Tucker - Koivu - Ryder
V. Bure - Conroy - Hossa
Leclair - Ribeiro - Asham
Higgins - Cassels - Stevenson
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Ward - Plekanec - Savage

Defense
Markov - Schneider
Hill - Desjardins
Brisebois - Rivet
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Komisarek - Robidas
Odelein

Goaltenders
Theodore
Vokoun
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Garon

This does not include undrafted players (can't think of any significant ones offhand) and it ignores traded draft picks, so it's not a perfect reflection of recent drafting prowess.

The wings are a glaring weakness. There is a slight improvement over the current real world Habs at centre. The defense is old but very solid, which can probably be attributed to Serge Savard's drafting. Goaltending is superb.

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Terry Frei has penned this bland article on Habs owner George Gillett. I'm only pointing it out because features on the Habs are exceedingly rare at ESPN.com.

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The Edmonton Sun reports that the NHL was far from groundbreaking with most of it's rule changes this year. I hadn't really thought about it before, but it's true: every single rule change (except the silly wireless fencing for goalies) has already been applied by various minor and rec leagues. Maybe next season the league will require teams to play lines of comparable skill head-to-head for fixed length 60-second shifts to ensure that players can develop at their own pace and everyone receives their fair share of icetime.

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Included in today's TSN morning email was this delightful yet disturbing piece on the history of figure skating costumes. What, exactly, does this have to do with sports?? Competitive Eating (just plain disturbing) has more to do with sport than that editorial.

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Darius Kasparaitis: Barbra Streisand's long lost son??