[1500 words, ready for grading, double draft media] 

With Vancouver rolling out a deep roster next season, I thought I'd go a bit into one of the most influential parts of the rebuild: last season's SMJHL entry draft. To really get the story of how this rookie class came together, we have to start at the S54 draft, where Vancouver made a trade to move up from 42nd overall to 40th, giving up a future Reddit 6th round pick to select Jason Desrouleaux. Turns out, due to an oversight, we didn't have a Reddit 6th-round pick (which was the trade compensation), so we lost a 5th in the renegotiation and a 3rd from punishment. So before S54 even started, Vancouver was down to a 1st, 2nd and 4th in the next draft. Fast forward to the season and the Whalers, to put it mildly, sucked. After a 3-1 start to the S54 campaign, the team hit the skids by promptly losing ten straight games and something like 18 of 20 going into the All-Star Break. Captain Sven Yxskaft had stayed down with Vancouver to have one last shot at a Four Star Cup, and with the team being nowhere near the playoffs at the midway point, the decision was made to explore trading him to give him that chance. We had interest from a couple teams, but ultimately got an offer from Carolina that blew the bidding out of the water, offering a first-round pick in a Reddit draft. Yxskaft was part of the process the whole time and the final decision to sign off on the trade was his, and it ended up being a pretty good win-win deal. Yxskaft ultimately won a Four Star Cup with the Kraken, and we got a very nice return for him.

The next piece of the impromptu teardown was centre Stracimir Petrovic. While he had put up a team-leading 35 points in the S53 campaign where the Whalers nearly pulled a playoff spot out of their ass with one of the lowest-TPE rosters in the league, the team was going nowhere with him, he was inactive, and Vancouver had no chance of making the playoffs. We shopped him around and got a bite from Anaheim, packing him off for a fourth-round pick that would become a third-rounder if Anaheim made the finals, a condition that ended up being converted. With the tank job complete and going into the SMJHL draft, we had turned three picks in the first six rounds into five and had the second overall pick. A few days before the draft, we made possibly the most impactful move of the class. St. Louis called us about the second overall pick, and after some negotiations we were able to turn our 2nd overall pick into the 8th, 30th, and 58th overall picks. I hadn't scouted many people yet at this point, so acquiring more picks was in line with our plans. With seven picks in the first six rounds in hand, it was time to turn our attention to scouting.

Now for the scouting. Since we now had picks in "clusters" at 8, 12 (the pick we got from Carolina), and 13 as well as a grouping at 30, 33 (the pick we got from Anaheim) and 37, we went with a very BPA-style strategy of planning out our draft. We were going to take a player at 8, wait a few picks, and then take the two best players off the board at 12 and 13. Position-wise, we knew we wanted to take two centres and two defensemen, and fill out other positions around there. For the later cluster of picks, we scouted some names but overall it was going to be a very on-the-fly process once we got down that far. For our 8th pick, we kicked the tires on Evangelos Giannopoulos, but on draft night Detroit traded up ahead of us to draft him so we went with another player we had heavily scouted in Dee Centerman IV. For the back-to-back picks at 12 and 13, I was pushing hard to draft first-gens here. We ran mocks in the back room to figure out who was going to be available, and two names stuck out to us: Jonas Kahnwald and Sarah Burke. We had them ranked pretty much equally, and since we were expecting to use our 8th pick on a defenseman, we were only going to pick one of them. In the end, we probably could have taken both here with how things went down, but then we got a surprise on draft night: KnockedOut ByOvechkin, the top-ranked forward on our draft board and the class leader in TPE at the time, somehow fell to us at 12th overall. We weren't expecting him to be available, but he fell so we happily snapped him up. With our second of the back-to-back picks we decided to go with Sarah Burke. All three of these players have been great on the ice and in our locker room, and they'll be big pieces of our playoff push next season.

With a break until the 30th overall pick, we regrouped and watched players go off the board while we planned for our next cluster of picks at 30th, 33rd and 37th overall. I had floated the idea of using the 37th overall pick to draft our next goalie, but they all went off the board in the 2nd so that plan went out the window quickly. Luke was a big part of the scouting here, pointing out players that had been active on Discord. At 30th overall we got another huge add. Rikki Petrov was a recreate (whose last player was a Whalers legend) who we had ranked highly and didn't expect to be on the board at 30, so we were happy to add him to the team and fill out the centre position. At 33rd overall we were starting to need to take deeper dives into the prospect pool to figure out who to pick, and Luke suggested Valtterri Kauppinen, a first-generation winger who was, by his assessment, the most vocal first-gen user in the rookie Discord. He ended up being available so we grabbed him at 33rd. With our last pick at 37th overall before we got into flier territory, I went through the list and noticed a first-generation defenseman with a wild name: Zebulon Leavitt. He had a media article, so he was an attractive option to add to the locker room. In hindsight, we made six picks and got six hits, with all six rookies being in the top 28 of the class for TPE and getting four active first-generation users out of it.

We still had a couple picks left at 58th and 73rd overall that had a chance of getting someone, so we just started throwing names out there at this point. There were about five or six players that we considered, and had them all go off the board before we picked. It was at this point where I made a bit of a mistake. We had a choice between either taking a flyer on a forward or drafting a backup goalie, and had considered picking Valtteri Aalto. He ended up going one pick before we were up to draft, and I either forgot or didn't realize that Ragnar-Alexandre Ragnarsson-Tremblay, another goalie, was still on the board. I knew he was a DFA for Colorado and was roommates with Lespoils, so I figured Colorado would have picked him up already, but this was a brain fart. We ended up using the pick on Clint O'Connor, a Reddit first-gen who we figured had a good chance of showing up, and while he was briefly active and accepted his contract he ended up going inactive and being replaced with undrafted free agent signing Markleesio Hopscotch, Kraagenskul's real-life son. I like to think we got two for the price of one on that pick. For our last pick at 73rd overall we took a flier on King Leaf due to him having his update thread. He never accepted his contract offer, never logged in, and was replaced with inactive backup Sergei Potvinov as a waiver claim after playing only one game for Vancouver.

In hindsight, while the 58th pick was a misstep and we had to do a lot on the fly, we got really good value in our picks and trades for this class and it's been a big reason for the turnaround. As mentioned before, all 6 active rookies taken in the top 40 are some of the better earners in this rookie class, and our locker room Discord is really popping these days. While our playoff run didn't last as long as we were hoping, it was a thrilling ride.