First Round of the Waiver Draft Complete

Well, the sleeping Ducks were picked up in the first round. The two prizes of the Waiver Draft, Teemu Selanne (John P.) and Scott Niedermayer (Peter) were snapped up before the top teams could lay their grubby little hands on them. With Selanne returning for the Ducks on Tuesday night against the Islanders and Niedermayer already having some games under his belt, they could prove to be very valuable assets to these teams for a good run in the last 10 weeks of the season.

Of course, the top available forward, Radim Vrbata (Ryan) went number one in the draft. The top defenseman, Rob Blake (Jeff) fell down to 6th, probably because of his injury for the next few weeks. The top goalie, Mathieu Garon (Benson) was passed over once for a goalie who will play more minutes.

Three of the players dropped will not be returning to their respective NHL clubs due to injury, so they were more than happily dropped. The team from which players were dropped from the most was surprisingly Dallas, they had two. Detroit and Anaheim each had a pair of players picked up. Three pool teams ended up passing on the Draft altogether. To no surprise, two of them were in the top three.

The second round should see some more team improvements, but now the teams will have a much more shallow talent pool to choose from... unless they want to get a forward. There still seems to be a fair few forwards kicking around.

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