The Montreal Canadiens have two first round draft picks in the 2025 NHL draft, one from the Calgary Flames at 16th overall, and their own at 17th overall. These are smack dab in the middle of the pack, as the Flames just fell short of a playoff spot, and the Canadiens were the lowest seeded playoff team that was eliminated in the first round.
We can look back and see what the odds are that a player picked at a certain position could make it to the NHL. There have been 60 drafts, so there's a pool of 60 players, and 60 years to look back on, which is a pretty good sample size.
So, in the 60 17th overall draft picks, 50 of them went on to play at least one NHL game. So, we are running at about an 83% chance. But if a draft pick goes on to play just one game, that isn't really a success.
Around 500 games is a pretty solid NHL career, and 25 or 41 percent have crossed the 500-game plateau. At the top, just seven players, or 1.1 percent have played over 1,000 games.
The great exceptions
There have been a few great players that were selected at 17th overall, even some by the Canadiens but we will get to those. Two players, though, stand head and shoulders above the rest. One almost became a Canadien, and would've changed the landscape of the NHL in the 1980s.
Back in 1969, when the league was small enough that the 17th overall pick was in the second round, a young diabetic out of Flin Flon by the name of Bobby Clarke was drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers. He should have been drafted in the first round, but the diabetes diagnosis was enough to scare most teams off.
But not enough to make offers on him though. Apparently the Canadiens offered the Flyers "an offer they couldn't refuse". But refuse they did. The Detroit Red Wings also took a run at Clarke, but the Flyers made it absolutely clear that they were not parting from what they hoped to be their young star.
And to their credit, Philadelphia and Clarke kept that partnership for his whole career. Clarke played 1,144 games, all with the Flyers, was the captain for a long part of that tenure and won two Stanley Cups.
The other great success of the 17th overall pick should be pretty familiar, as he just retired one season ago. Zach Parise was a scout's darling, being undersized and highly skilled. He was ranked high, but fell out of the top 15.
The New Jersey Devils saw the vision, and traded up with the Edmonton Oilers to get him. It was a fantastic trade, as neither Jean-Francois Jacques and Marc-Antoine Pouliot cracked 200 games in the NHL.
Parise, on the other hand, wound up playing in just over 1,000, mostly with the Devils and the Wild, with brief stops on the Islanders and the Avalanche. In his last year with the Devils, he and the team made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, before losing to the L.A. Kings.
Parise was also part of one of the biggest signings in free agency history. He left the New Jersey Devils for free agency, he found himself in Minnesota with a fancy 13 year, $98 million contract. The crazy thing was that Ryan Suter signed with the exact same team for the exact same contract.
It didn't really work out too well for the team or the players, if the goal was the Stanley Cup. The Wild were a consistently good regular season team, but could never perform in the playoffs, and Parise wound up getting bought out at the end of his contract.