There’s a bit of NHL draft folklore that dates back to when the draft was a little longer than it is now. It goes like this: In the final round an executive with a soft heart from an NHL team would scan the crowd and try to find a kid who attended the draft with his family and was facing the real, excruciating possibility that his name would never get called. They’d find out who it was, make the pick, give the kid a moment to remember for the rest of his life and that was that. There was never any expectation the kid would play in the NHL.



Now with the value of draft picks so high, that presumably doesn’t happen. And with their final pick in Dallas, the Red Wings did the exact opposite. They picked a prospect who couldn’t have been further from the draft, who had no idea he was even under consideration. A kid who certainly wasn’t planning on it happening or preparing for any development camps. He didn’t even go to the draft combine in...