(Ed. Note: It’s the NHL Alternate History project! We’ve asked fans and bloggers from 31 teams to pick one turning point in their franchise’s history and ask ‘what if things had gone differently?’ Trades, hirings, firings, wins, losses, injuries … all of it. How would one different outcome change the course of history for an NHL team? Today, it’s the team of writers from Buckeye State Hockey on the Columbus Blue Jackets. Really silly image courtesy Matt Souva. Enjoy!)

By Buckeye State Hockey

There are so many “what if’s” when it comes to the Columbus Blue Jackets, and a lot of long-time fans’ ire is directed back to the hiring of Doug MacLean as general manager.

During MacLean’s tenure, there were no less than 150 transactions over seven calendar years, many of which left fans and pundits scratching their heads, pondering which was the most ludicrous.

Was it when captain Adam Foote left the team via (a demanded?) trade and caught a private jet to play in an Avalanche game that very night? Was it when MacLean traded the 33rd overall pick (that became Loui Eriksson) for an aging, broken down Grant Marshall? How about when the club traded burgeoning young defender Francois Beauchemin (and Tyler Wright) for over-the-hill centerman Sergei Fedorov?

Nay. Today, we’ll argue that the deferred evolution of the Blue Jackets as a legitimate NHL organization traces back to one errant decision.

One boneheaded move. And it revolves around the 2005 Entry Draft.

What if….the Columbus Blue Jackets had drafted Anze Kopitar?

Sounds crazy right? Maybe you didn’t know that was even an option! Oh, but it was.

Let’s jump in our way back machine and look at the year that was 2005.

Coming out of the cancelled 2004/2005 season, the draft was the first major hockey-related event since the new CBA had been ratified, so the buzz surrounding it was off-the-charts. Not to mention, this was “The Crosby Draft”, which amplified its significance all the more.

Heading into the draft, beyond the consensus top pick of Sidney Crosby, there were a handful of guys who were more or less viewed the same by the hockey media: forwards Bobby Ryan, Benoit Pouliot and Gilbert Brule, and defenseman Jack Johnson.

Those five players were expected to be the top five players drafted, and all was going according to plan until Montreal nabbed Carey Price fifth overall. (See their Alternate History for more on that.) The selection, which was deemed a reach at the time, and was notoriously skewered live on-air by Pierre McGuire, also meant that a top five player, Gilbert Brule, was available to Columbus who had the sixth pick. The Jackets needed a center, Brule fit the bill, great, let’s all go home.

Except that isn’t how the draft is supposed to work.

Teams draft based off of their list. They employ a whole bunch of scouts, who spend a year watching hundreds of games, then sit around for days, sometime weeks, before the draft and argue over every detail and player placement on that list. They order the players exactly as they believe they should be picked. It is considered a crime against hockey for a GM to overrule his scouting staff and pick against the list.

So what do we know about the CBJ’s list that year? We know that Anze Kopitar was 3rd on their scouts’ list, and Brule was in the 6-8 range. Don Boyd, the head of scouting for the Jackets at the time, was strongly pro-Kopitar. But, when it came time to pick, MacLean had a change of heart, overruling Boyd and the rest of the staff to take Brule. Why would a GM commit such a sacrilegious move?

Well, Brule had the profile of being “gritty” and “hard-nosed,” while Kopitar “pushes rocks up a mountain and jumps over milk crates and calls it training,” as MacLean noted at the time. Simply put, it was a seemingly “safe” pick that overruled months of hard scouting.

“How do we go with the Slovenian ahead of the Canadian?” is a real, direct quote from MacLean, an outlandish statement that he used while trying to DEFEND the pick in hindsight! With logic and reasoning like that, even years removed from the pick, it’s pretty easy to see why MacLean is thought of the way he is in Columbus and throughout hockey circles.

So what happened from there?

For Columbus, picking Gilbert Brule never panned out. In the year after being drafted, Brule couldn’t stick in the NHL, and the Blue Jackets returned him to the Vancouver Giants. This isn’t a serious sin, but it also wasn’t an exactly brilliant start. Unfortunately, the forward never made huge strides from there.