It’s no secret that drafting in professional sports can be a crapshoot, a lesson that the Carolina Hurricanes have learned over the years.
The draft is a fickle mistress, teasing you with untold potential and the chance of landing a franchise player. Teams put in an enormous amount of work evaluating talent, separating the pretenders from the blue-chippers, though the system doesn’t always hold.
In this article, we’ll take a look at five first-round picks that failed to pan out for the Carolina Hurricanes. Along with that, we’ll take a look at some players who the Hurricanes could have chosen.
As a disclaimer, I realize how easy it is to look back now and how the players who were chosen later were not guaranteed to develop the way that they did. This is simply speculation, a fun diversion from the summer hockey wasteland.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look back.