Montreal Canadiens Best Ever NHL Draft Classes: #4

The Montreal Canadiens head to Nashville for the 2023 NHL Draft with hopes of stuffing an already pretty full prospect cupboard. They have a top five pick, two first rounders and 11 picks in total and will obviously want to come away with some impact NHL players.

As we await the start of the draft on Wednesday night, we are looking back at the Canadiens performances in previous drafts and are ranking the best and worst. Today, we look at the fourth best NHL Draft in Canadiens history.

The 1998 NHL Draft did not start off with a bang for the Canadiens, who went with a high scoring QMJHL product named Eric Chouinard. He had some huge potential at the time, but it didn’t come together for him and he would only play 90 career NHL games which is not the impact you want from a 16th overall pick.

The Canadiens made up for a lost first pick later on. In the second round, they selected Mike Ribeiro and he would go on to play over 1000 NHL games and score 228 goals and 793 points. He played a pivotal second line role on the team behind Saku Koivu until he was traded for Janne Niinimaa, but that doesn’t make the draft selection any worse.

Francois Beauchemin was drafted in the third round and though he didn’t stick around long with the Canadiens, he did have a long successful career. He quickly became a reliable, two-way defender who was better known for the defensive side of the game and was capable of playing a lot of minutes. He helped the Anaheim Ducks win the Stanley Cup in 2007 who had a couple of Hall of Fame defensemen in Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger, but Beauchemin was a steady number three on a deep blue line.

The best player to come from the 1998 NHL Draft was Andrei Markov and he was not selected until the sixth round. The Russian two-way defender would go on to play on the team’s number top pairing for close to a decade and scored 572 points in 990 career NHL games, all with the Canadiens.

Michael Ryder was also taken in the 1998 NHL Draft, falling to the Habs in the 8th round. Ryder scored 237 goals and 484 points in 806 career games, and twice hit the 30 goal plateau with the Canadiens. Considering he was drafted in a round that doesn’t even exist anymore, Ryder was quite the find in the 1998 draft.

The Canadiens drafted a total of ten players in 1998 with seven of them eventually playing NHL games which is extremely impressive. Four of them became key contributors on their teams and Markov was among the best at his position for a number of years. That is quite an impressive group to get in just one draft year.

Hopefully, they can start the 2023 NHL Draft off with a bang and then continue to find future NHL contributors throughout the later rounds.

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