Rite of Summer

Washington Capitals -- 2013 Draft: A Well Traveled Path to a First Rounder

With their first round pick (23^rd overall) in the 2013 NHL Entry Draft, the Washington Capitals selected Andre Burakovsky of the Malmo Redhawks of HockeyAllsvenskan in Sweden.  Observers of the Capitals are hardly surprised.  The Caps have worn a path between Arlington, Virginia, and Sweden over the years in their search for amateur talent.  Here is the history of draft picks from Sweden since 2000…

Of the last ten first round draft picks taken by the Caps, starting with Nicklas Backstrom with the fourth overall pick in 2006, five come out of teams in Sweden.  The early returns on draft picks from Sweden at the beginning of the 2000’s was not very good, owing largely to those picks coming in later rounds.  But three of four first round picks before Burakovsky, starting with Backstrom, either played significant numbers of games for the Caps (Backstrom, Marcus Johansson), or they (“they” being Filip Forsberg) yielding a solid veteran in trade.
   

Burakovsky might be a year or two away from coming to North America, but the path he takes to get here is a familiar one in recent Caps history.

Rock the Mock! ...NHL draft, that is

We do not earn a living as a scout, a general manager, or a media analyst of the NHL.  This makes us uniquely qualified to spout utter gibberish about who will select whom in Sunday's NHL Entry Draft.  What follows is not science.  We merely combed the four corners of the hockey universe for mock drafts from media outlets, aggregated them, and came up with a "draft of drafts."  The only tweak we made to it was to take the Colorado Avalanche at its word that they would be drafting a forward with the first overall pick.  So, let's get to it...

For you Caps fans, the Kerby Rychel pick at 23 is an interesting result.  Once you get past the top four picks, players who have been cemented into the top-four for a year now, Rychel was the most consistent in terms of where he was slotted.  In all but one mock draft we looked at, he was slotted between 20th and 24th overall.

Of course, now that we've said that, we don't think Rychel will be a Cap because we do not think the Caps will stay at 23.

Call it a hunch.