Following the 2023-24 season, the second-worst in franchise history, the Anaheim Ducks earned the right to select third overall at the 2024 NHL Entry Draft.
After the clear top prospect, Macklin Celebrini, the 2024 draft was chock-full of highly skilled defensemen and a wide array of boom-or-bust forwards.
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The San Jose Sharks selected Celebrini with their first overall pick, and the Chicago Blackhawks nabbed the consensus highest-ranked right-shot defenseman, Artyom Levshunov. That placed the Ducks in a position to choose between a questionable-fitting left-shot defenseman like Zeev Buium, Sam Dickinson, or Anton Silayev, a right-shot defenseman with questionable translatability like Zayne Parekh or Carter Yakemchuk, or several highly volatile forwards.
Every forward in the tier behind Celebrini had question marks. Cayden Lindstrom missed most of the season with a herniated disc, Tij Iginla and Beckett Sennecke had great second halves of their seasons, but sample size is always a concern with “late risers,” and Berkly Catton is on the slighter side, leaving his projection as an NHL center up in the air.
For as long as public scouts had been evaluating the class, the consensus second-best player in the 2024 draft was Ivan Demidov: the player whom every fanbase behind San Jose was clamoring for or crossing their fingers in hopes he fell to their favorite team.
Demidov, too, however, came with multiple question marks attached. Though endlessly talented, smart, and creative, he wasn’t given a fair or consistent opportunity to play in the KHL for SKA St. Petersburg in his draft year (2023-24). His club kept him at the MHL level, Russia’s junior division, one far inferior to his talent level and a league subpar to the CHL.
Indications were that Demidov’s production was taken with a grain of salt. During the season, North American scouts and GMs weren’t afforded the opportunity to scout him in person and relied on video as well as their hired Russian scouts to build their reports, further hurting his draft stock. Then there was the question of his unorthodox skating, which he uses as a unique form of deception, but left some wondering about viability against larger, more developed opponents on a smaller ice surface.
The Ducks ultimately selected Beckett Sennecke with their third overall pick, surprising many (including and perhaps most of all, Sennecke himself). Similarly to Demidov, he is dripping with talent, and as Ducks GM Pat Verbeek indicated at the time of the draft, he can play any style of game required: skill, heavy, speed, etc.
It took time for Sennecke to grow into his 6-foot-4 frame after a tremendous and quick growth spurt, but once he did in the second half of the 2023-24 season, his shift-to-shift dominance and production skyrocketed.
What had many scratching their heads at the time of the pick was that, to that point, the highest Sennecke ranking among public scouting outlets was ninth overall (Elite Prospects), with the lowest being 16th overall (FC Hockey).
Those rankings left many to wonder: Why not simply trade down if the Ducks wanted Sennecke?
Trades within the top ten are extremely rare and for good reason. If teams like a player, they prefer to select him when they can, rather than take the chance he’s gone by the time they will be on the clock again.
In Sennecke’s case, there were reports that if Demidov was unavailable to the Montreal Canadiens at fifth overall, they were keen on Sennecke in that spot. So the lowest the Ducks could potentially trade down to was fifth, but if Montreal knew the Ducks were uninterested in Demidov, it wouldn’t have made sense for them to part with assets to move up.
Teams have a different scouting process and produce vastly different lists than what is made available to the public.
“We make our own assessments throughout the year, and whether a player is going up or down on public lists before the draft, it really has no impact on our process,” Ducks assistant GM and director of amateur scouting Martin Madden said a week before the 2024 draft. “Your question could also be answered by looking at historically, do players who improve a lot in the second half of the year end up being better players than those who fall? We’ve looked at that, and I don’t think there’s any real conclusion to be drawn. I think it’s pretty random. You have to look at the season or the previous two seasons as a whole to try to predict what the future five will look like. So that’s the way we go about it.”
Sennecke proved many doubters wrong with an impressive 2024-25 campaign, scoring 86 points (36-50=86) in 56 regular season games with the Oshawa Generals of the OHL, evolving and growing every aspect of his game throughout. As he seemingly does, he elevated his game when the lights got brightest, scoring 32 points (14-18=32) in just 18 playoff games.
Demidov eventually got the opportunity to prove his translatability in 2024-25, playing the full season in the KHL and producing 49 points (19-30=49) in 65 regular season games and adding five points (3-2=5) in six playoff games. He made the jump to North America at the end of the year to make his debut with the Canadiens, electrifying those who tuned in with a two-point performance and adding two points (0-2=2) in five playoff games.
If Demidov can continue this trajectory, he will keep Blackhawks, Ducks, and Columbus Blue Jackets (who drafted Cayden Lindstrom fourth overall) fans wondering “what if?” However, selecting Sennecke at third overall was perfectly defensible then and is perfectly defensible today.
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