Canadiens: For Juraj Slafkovsky, Alexandre Daigle Isn't a Draft Bust, He's a Draft Lesson.
Alexandre Daigle is a player I’ve always hesitated to call the NHL’s biggest draft bust. Not just as a writer covering the Montreal Canadiens, but as a fan of the NHL and its history in general.
Now, before you call me nuts for having such an opinion, Daigle at his core obviously is a draft bust, and I’m not here to say that he in any way lived up to the expectations placed upon him after being selected first overall by the Ottawa Senators in the 1993 NHL Draft. He didn’t, but there’s a very specific reason why he didn’t, and Daigle’s story and career goes so much farther and deeper than simply being an NHL draft bust.
When it comes to the debate regarding the NHL’s all-time biggest draft bust, there are quite a few names that can be thrown out, including some once associated with the Canadiens.
I’ve mentioned before how, in a 15-year period between 1985 and 2001, Habs management drafted just one player (Saku Koivu) in the first round who would become a consistent top-six contributor with the team (take that for what you will). However, almost every one of the failed picks from this period were underwhelming more than anything, at least if you ignore the players who were taken after (don’t look it up it just hurts).
In the case of the No. 1 pick, however, Doug Wickenheiser sticks in most people’s minds when mentioning all-time draft blunders, with the Habs taking the Saskatchewan-born WHL star first overall over French-Canadian forward Denis Savard, whom most if not all of the Canadiens fanbase wanted.
Playing in a city that never wanted him on a team that was filled to the brim with depth offensively, Wickenheiser never found a regular spot in Montreal’s lineup, being shipped to the St. Louis Blues in essentially a throw-away deal for forward Perry Turnbull.
Up until their selection of Slovakian forward Juraj Slafkovsky first overall in the 2022 Draft, Wickenheiser was the Habs last first overall pick. Naturally, with any No. 1 overall pick, there are expectations that will come with said pick, something Slafkovsky has no doubt felt now entering the midway point of his second NHL season.
Similarly, Daigle at one point had such expectations placed upon him, though, ultimately, his and so many other draft busts stories over the course of the NHL’s history, serve as a lesson as to why realistic expectationsare not just important, but essential to a players development, lest we have another case of a Daigle coming in to save a franchise he simply couldn’t on his own.
On January 26th, 2024, Amazon Prime is set to release a documentary on Daigle’s life and career as the former first overall pick in the 1993 Draft. A Montreal native and once utterly dominant junior star with the QMJHL’s Victoriaville Tigres, Daigle had a mystique and media attention surrounding him that mimicked that of players like Auston Matthews, Connor McDavid, and most recently, Chicago Blackhawks center Connor Bedard. With astonishing 45-92-137 totals over 53 games with the Tigres in 1992-93, Daigle’s stock was at an all-time high during an NHL season which many consider to be the best in league history.
As we all know, the Canadiens weren’t exactly in the running for Daigle, having claimed their 24th and to date, final Stanley Cup against all odds that season (selecting Koivu 21st overall instead) yet a number of other Canadian teams were, including but not limited to the Quebec Nordiques, Edmonton Oilers and of course, the Ottawa Senators.
Now, as I’ve written about to no end over the past however many months, the Senators aren’t doing very good right now, which is quite frankly a catastrophic failure considering the amount of talent they have on their roster. However, when compared to the franchises beginnings in that 92-93 season, this current Senators squad seems more akin to the legendary Ottawa Silver Seven from the pre-NHL era, where One Eyed Frank McGee, Percy LeSuer and company led the club to 11 St+anley Cup titles before relocating to St. Louis in 1934 (strange I know), and things would somehow only get worse with Daigle in the picture.
1992-93 was not a good year for the Senators, nor was it a good year for NHL Expansion in general. With a 10-70-4 record (I know that sounds fake, but it isn’t) the first-year Senators were quite simply putrid, with a 5-3 season opening win against the Canadiens giving fans falsified hope that this team may be better than what was once initially thought. As it would turn out, they weren’t even getting started, dropping their next 21 straight games and setting an NHL record with 39 consecutive losses on the road, finally winning against the New York Islanders in game 81 of what was an 84-game season.
So yeah, things weren’t looking especially great. All the while, the attention surrounding Daigle grew and grew and grew, with it becoming more and more apparent as the season wore on that the Montreal native was a likely lock to go to Ottawa first overall, an opportunity no team in the NHL would’ve passed on at that time no matter how much hindsight we have today.
In spite of receiving purported offers including the likes of Peter Forsberg and Owen Nolan from the Nordiques (it’s okay Senators fans, I know it hurts), on June 26th, 1993, Ottawa selected Daigle with the first overall pick, promptly giving him a loaded 5-year contract worth $12.25 million before he had even stepped foot on professional ice (more on that later). Regarding his draft position, Daigle uttered the now famous comment “I’m glad I got drafted first, because nobody remembers number two”.
As we all know, No. 2 was Chris Pronger. And No. 4 was Paul Kariya.
Again, hindsight, as most people saw it as idiotic taking anyone but Daigle first, but the point still remains. Even still, Ottawa has Daigle, they drafted Alexie Yashin the year before in 1992, and they have the support of a city desperate to have hockey back after such a storied history. Everything is coming up Milhouse, and the Senators future seems a bit brighter at least, right?
Well… nope. It goes without saying that the 1990s NHL Expansion was a weird time. In the modern-day, expansion teams like the Seattle Kraken and Vegas Golden Knights have spoiled most NHL fans when it comes to their immediate success in both the regular season and playoffs (with Vegas having already won the Stanley Cup in just their sixth season this past Summer).
Yet, for the longest and I mean longest time basically until Vegas joined the league in 2017, NHL Expansion was seen as a recipe for misery and dismal performance until said Expansion Team slowly acquired draft capitol which would hopefully lead to home-grown star players leading the team into the future. With the rules for player protection in the Expansion Draft being far more lenient at that time, the majority of expansion teams were left to pick from the scraps, not like the Marc-Andre Fleury’s and Jordan Eberle’s the Golden Knights and Kraken found themselves with respectively.
Now, when I say scraps, you might be thinking of guys like a Mark Napier or Keith Acton to use old Canadiens, guys who weren’t necessarily breakout offensive stars, but knew how to produce and put the puck in net.
Those aren’t the kind of scraps I’m talking about. I’m talking about the kind you forget in the back of the cupboard for a few years. The kind that could light it up in the minor leagues but never quite figured things out in the show. The kind that well, no player realistically could have done anything with to make a team competitive no matter their talent.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Ottawa expected Alexandre Daigle to do from the onset, and that right there is why I view Daigle less as the NHL’s all-time worst draft bust, and moreso a perfect case study into why realistic expectations are, as I said, essential as essential can be to a prospects development, something Ottawa never had and still to an extent doesn’t have, turning to Joonas Korpisalo to save the teams net in free agency when he’s never served a No. 1 starting role in the NHL.
Ottawa handled Daigle’s development horrifically, and essentially thought that, rather than getting a prospect, they would be getting the next Wayne Gretzky right away to carry the team into the promised land. That’s akin to saying that the magic beans Jack sold his cow for in Jack and the Beanstalk would realistically lead to a Golden Goose. It’s a delusion that should be a product of the past, yet is still seen in remnants today, and its something that will only ever hurt a prospect, and that applies just as much to guys like Slafkovsky as it did to Daigle.
In Ottawa’s inaugural season, their leading scorer was Norm Maciver, a talented-yet undersized defenseman from Thunder Bay, Ontario, who carved out a solid if unremarkable career as a power-play specialist from 1987 till 1998. In between stints with the Rangers, Oilers, Penguins, Jets, Whalers and Coyotes, Maciver posted superb 17-46-63 totals over 80 games in 92-93, after starting the season opener on the Senators third pairing. While he would never reach those heights again, Daigle at least had the benefit of playing alongside a budding superstar in Yashin his first season in Ottawa, but the rest of the roster was, well, non-existent.
Aside from Yashin and the introduction of Daniel Alfredsson as the team’s new franchise forward in the 95-96 season, the Sens other top scorers in Daigle’s first three seasons included the likes of Randy Cunneyworth (yes, the former Habs coach) Dave McLIwain, Bob Kudelski, Sylvain Turgeon, and Steve Larouche. While all solid players in their own right (with Larouche being one of the purest goal-scorers in minor league history), it wasn’t exactly a great sign if they were on your first line.
By the time other established scorers had entered the fold like Shawn McEachern and Radek Bonk, Daigle was already gone, with Ottawa management having finally soured on him after a dismal start to the 97-98 season, sending him to the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for Vaclav Propsal and Pat Falloon, another draft bust.
After this, Daigle just kind of drifted from team to team, being given a chance time and time again as a reclamation project but never matching his performances from his first few years with the Sens, let alone his numbers in junior. While he had a solid end to the season in Philadelphia, a terrible start to 98-99 and subsequent stints in Tampa Bay and New York did little to salvage things, and Daigle was out of hockey entirely by 2000-01.
After two years away from the game however, Daigle made a comeback with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2002-03. Going on to lead the Minnesota Wild in scoring in 2003-04 with 20-31-51 totals, Daigle was nominated for the Bill Masterton Trophy for perseverance, making a return against genuinely all odds after signing with the Wild out of free agency, going on afterwards to play in Switzerland until the 2009-10 season.
Now this is where our story should end, but ultimately, in spite of never posting more than 51 points in a single-season, and never possessing anything close to a work ethic that matched his skill, I can’t say that, should any other team besides Ottawa have drafted Daigle, he would’ve been the same draft bust and the same underachieving player he became for the Senators. Referring back to those initial stages after he was first drafted, Ottawa’s decision to hand Daigle that massive contract didn’t just potentially play a role in his lack of effort, it did play a role.
In fact, it played quite a prominent role, and this, is yet another example of why not only realistic expectations are needed in the development of a prospect, but composure as well, as, in the case of the Senators, most of their mistakes made with Daigle were ones out of desperation, a desperation that almost cost them the team entirely.
If you give a kid all the money he’s ever wanted before he even steps foot on professional ice, its shouldn’t be surprising if he doesn’t put in the effort to earn said money considering he well, already got it. It’s the same mistake the Oakland Raiders made with JaMarcus Russell in the 2007 NFL Draft, and it’s a mistake that prompted league intervention in both the NFL and NHL to prevent such disasters from happening again.
Thankfully, were in 2024 now, not 1993, and not only has the Expansion Draft improved as NHL executives realized with how much owners pay for these teams, they shouldn’t be given every other team’s table scraps, but the NHL Draft has too.
Teams prospect pools are deeper, scouting and analytics are apart of the game more than ever before, and a teams draft philosophy isn’t completely and totally centered on size and size only (genuinely what was with the 90s NHL and its obsession with size). Juraj Slafkovsky came into a Canadiens team that already had a decent foundation built around star forwards in Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki, and now playing alongside those two on the first line, Slafkovsky has been given a chance to develop and progress naturally and more importantly, patiently, as Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis has always emphasized an open and learning environment above all else.
Slafkovsky isn’t here to save the Canadiens right away, nor should it be expected he’s the player to do so. He’s a promising prospect and has played remarkably solidly over the past few months, and there’s a high chance his ceiling extends beyond being another top-six NHL forward. St. Louis and company know what they have in Slafkovsky and aren’t putting pressure on him to be something he simply isn’t ready to be, which is exactly what Ottawa did with Daigle.
For all the worry fans had comparing Slafkovsky to other prospects like Logan Cooley and Shane Wright taken directly after, especially after a less than ideal start to this current season, things have expectedly evened out. Cooley has hit the rookie wall and his numbers have regressed, and Shane Wright isn’t even in the NHL currently in spite of the Kraken’s offensive depth being less than ideal. Slafkovsky is progressing similarly to every other Top 10 pick from 2022 and that’s all-Canadiens management could ask for from him. He’s solidified the first line and brings excitement and intrigue night in and night out in spite of some growing pains.
The Canadiens have handled Slaf well this season and need to continue to do so. While the Conor Bedard’s and Connor McDavid’s of the hockey world are a treat to watch, they don’t come around often, and not every NHL Draft necessarily has a Bedard or McDavid among them. That’s the modern-day NHL for you, and as we move forward into what looks to be a continually bright future for the league, cases like Daigle need to serve as lessons to NHL GMs throwing the weight of the world onto a player that was far from a finished product, in spite of what his junior numbers would you have told you.
Even still, Alexandre Daigle isn’t just an draft bust. His story is far more complicated than that, and his career isn’t deserving of being brushed away with the label of being yet another whiff in the NHL Draft, let alone the biggest whiff of all time. Daigle isn’t a bust, he’s an example, a lesson and a true what-if, and considering he never really put effort in over his entire NHL career (save for his brief comeback) and still managed three 50-point seasons and some truly highlight-reel plays, says enough about the skill he possessed that Ottawa rushed out the door faster than EA rushes out the next Madden. Daigle wasn’t ready to save an NHL team let alone one like the Senators that had nothing, and well… still have nothing.
Juraj Slafkovsky is the future of the Canadiens in one way or another, yet as the Habs 2023-24 season continues, cases like Daigle continue to come up in casual NHL discussion. Yet, for as long as he’s been known as the NHL’s biggest draft bust, Daigle’s career is ultimately, so much more than that. Alexandre Daigle is a example and a lesson for every NHL GM, and he’s a pretty damn good one at that.
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