May was Mental Health Awareness Month. There is a virtually limitless number of forces that can impact your mental health as a hockey player. But if you are a 15-year-old elite-level player, there is one that looms far larger than all the rest: the OHL Draft.
Many players (and parents!) spend YEARS positioning for a player’s “draft year.” Copious resources are dedicated. Endless hours of thought, stress, consultation and positioning are “invested” in order to optimize one outcome—a player’s draft position.
I personally have seen hundreds (more likely thousands) of players impacted by it. A frightening number of players have been consumed by it. And FAR too many players’ careers completely derailed by the outcome of one event. One set of opinions at a single moment in time. One (what should be) Completely. Irrelevant. Outcome.
Sure, it’s great to be a high OHL Draft pick. Being a first-round pick, having a team pin its hopes on you, feels great. And if I’m being completely honest, it may buy a player a little bit more of the “benefit of the doubt.” It might buy you a little bit more leash, particularly near the start of your junior hockey career, if it gets off to a rocky start. But the point of this blog post is to demonstrate to the reader that the outcome of the OHL Draft ultimately doesn’t matter.
I will attempt to demonstrate by starting with my own career and touching on pre-draft positioning—specifically, getting yourself on the right team.
I could not have been better positioned. I played on a York Simcoe Express team that won the OHF championship as bantams (now U15). We had a 13-year NHL veteran as our head coach, Bob McGill, whom we all still have an amazing relationship with to this day! We would then go on to win the OHL Cup as minor midgets (now U16). Going into the draft, we were in what most people would view as the perfect position.
Next came the draft. We had nine guys drafted, of which I was one. We had players go in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th,6th,7th,8th and 14th rounds. Of those draft picks, five would go on to play OHL hockey. Another three would go on to play college hockey. (Keep in mind that this was before the OHL/NCAA/NIL rule changes.) We had two other players who went undrafted in the OHL—all the way through 15 rounds—who would go on to have major junior careers. Both of those players played Canadian university hockey. Both played some minor pro after that.
Two players from that team ended up as NHL Draft picks. Two ended up playing games in the AHL. Six in total (including the two undrafted players mentioned before) played some kind of professional hockey. Nine played either NCAA Division 1, Division 3, or Canadian university hockey. None of us ever played an NHL game.
So even for those whose draft day goes well—we had a team with numerous high picks—it guarantees you absolutely nothing.
Looking back 22 years later, it is my opinion that virtually none of the accomplishments (or lack thereof) for any of the players above were a result of the outcome of the OHL Draft. Now, I am also of the opinion that the outcome of that draft had a lasting impact on a subset of my teammates, and not in a positive way.
If you take nothing else away from this piece, realize that if your draft day does not go as planned, keep it in perspective. It’s one set of opinions. At one moment in time. There were guys on our team who should have been drafted. Good hockey players. Certainly more worthy to be drafted than many of the 300 players who were selected that day. But things did not fall into place for some of my teammates that day. And when you are 15 or 16 years old, that kind of disappointment can, and did, wreak havoc with players’ mental health. It doesn’t need to.
Obviously, everyone’s story is different, but it’s worth highlighting one that exemplifies the fact that the draft need not define you.
I mentioned that none of my OHL Cup-winning teammates nor I ever played an NHL game. Now, let’s talk about someone whose name also didn’t get called on the day of the 2004 OHL Draft. If you pull up the 2004 OHL Draft Guide, sitting there on the eligible players list was a kid listed at 5’9” and 145 pounds. Scored 59 points in 39 games for Cumberland. We had played against him the previous season at the OHFs, and while I remember him being a shifty, speedy player, we had spent more time in the pre-game meeting talking about knowing where Corey Frizell was on the ice. We weren’t necessarily wrong to pay attention to him—Corey and I were both drafted to the old Mississauga Ice Dogs, and he would go on to have a nice junior career in the Ottawa Junior A league before spending some time at an NCAA Division 3 school. However, Corey’s career did not include being a first-round pick in the 2006 NHL Draft, a world junior championship gold medal, a World Cup of Hockey championship, and, as of today, 1165 points in the NHL like his Cumberland teammate, Claude Giroux.
Claude went completely undrafted in the OHL, played a year of Tier II Junior A hockey in Ottawa, and then signed with Gatineau in the QMJHL. From there, he would go on to dominate the QMJHL, scoring 100-plus points in three straight years, winning a league championship, making a CHL First All-Star team, and being a first-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers–two short years after 20 OHL teams passed on him a combined 300 times!
Hopefully, Claude’s case will serve as a glaring example of how the results of the OHL Draft have very little, if any, bearing on the eventual outcome of a player’s career. But it is far from the only example. Since moving back from Singapore in 2018, I have had a front-row seat to player development as the Defensive Skills Coach at St. Andrew’s College. Most of our players at St. Andrew’s are OHL picks when they join “1st Hockey,” typically in Grade 11. Over the years, we have had high OHL picks that have done very well. We have had mid-round and late-round picks do very well. We’ve had players who did not get drafted in the OHL do very well. At the time of writing, the OHL U-18 Draft—a selection process for U-17 aged players whose OHL rights are unassigned at the time of the draft—has just concluded. St. Andrew’s had a player selected, Andy Huang. Andy was not drafted out of U-16, but he should be, at a minimum, a contributor to the Ottawa 67s after he finishes his Grade 12 year at the school. He is yet another example of how there are countless paths to advancement in the hockey world, irrespective of what happens with one set of opinions, at one moment in time. That’s all the OHL Draft is.
So, for those who do get selected high, enjoy it. It is certainly a nice feather in your cap. But all you’ve been given is one opportunity. No matter how high you get selected, you’ll still have to earn your second and third opportunities. And for those who don’t get picked where they want, and even those like Claude Giroux who don’t get picked at all, there are a multitude of ways that you can earn that first opportunity at the next level.
Stick to your process, keep things in perspective, and if you need a voice to help frame that perspective, don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at SkateGuard. We understand how heavily this can weigh on a player’s state of mind, and ultimately their mental health. We’re always happy to help!
