NHL Draft moved up to Oct 6/7 and who the experts think the Leafs could take at 15th overall

The Leafs first round pick and our new favourite son will arrive three days earlier than originally expected, as the NHL has announced Tuesday, October 6th as the opening night of the entry draft.

Breaking with the tradition of having the event on the weekend, the NHL is looking to maximize the potential for a little down time and have a true offseason by moving the draft forward. It’s entirely possible we see a similar move with free agency as well.

One of the other drivers behind this decision is probably to move the draft off of a holiday weekend, as it allows the league to shutdown for Canadian Thanksgiving as well as Columbus Day in the US.

So we are now officially less than one month to the entry draft. Cool. To celebrate, here’s a rundown of the TLN draft content for you to consume…

As the draft rankings sit today, the following players are ranked as going 15th overall by different publications…

So not a lot of consensus on who will go at 15. In his mock draft, Craig Button had the Leafs selecting Braden Schneider, largely because of the fact that a big RD is an organizational need. While I don’t disagree with Button on that selection, and think that Schneider could very much be the best player available and also fit the need of the organization, the two habits we’ve seen exhibited from Dubas at the draft show that he will still to his draft board, and take what appears to be the most skilled best player available regardless of size or position, and the second trait that we’ve seen from Dubas is that if he thinks that he can get the player he wants later in the draft he’s very comfortable with trading down and accumulating some additional picks along the way.

With 11 picks in this draft, I’m not sure how focused Dubas is going to be on trading down and picking up more picks, but never say never and Dubas has a way of making Day 2 of the draft just as interesting for Leafs fans as Day One.