Watching the Colorado Avalanche play hockey the other night, I was wondering to myself if the Flyers are participating in the same league. Was this the same sport?

What a team they’ve got out there in Denver. Nathan MacKinnon. Miko Rantanen. Top players up and down the roster, highlighted on the defensive side by 23 year old Cale Makar, who was on the board when the Flyers had the second pick in the 2017 NHL draft.

We wouldn’t call Makar a “miss” necessarily, which is why I used quotation marks in the story headline. Nobody thought it was a miss at the time, because Nolan Patrick was a consensus top-two center along with Nico Hischier, but watching the Avalanche play, it does make you wonder “what if?” What if the Flyers did end up with Makar, or the damn good Miro Heiskanen? Instead, Patrick wound up being traded after dealing with concussion issues that kept him off the ice.

With that as the backdrop, I went through the past five drafts for each team (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), to find the biggest “what if” story. Again, these aren’t necessarily draft misses, this is more of a “shit.. imagine if that guy wound up here” type of exercise:

 

Flyers: Cale Makar

The thing about Makar is that Anthony reported that Flyers scouts weren’t on the same page with Ron Hextall ahead of the 2017 draft. That was confirmed by Bobby Clarke in January, speaking on the Cam and Strick podcast.

Wrote Ant in 2021:

Watching Patrick practice on the first day of Training Camp for the Flyers, you could see what makes him a gifted talent. The puck skills. The skating ability. The control. The possession prowess. The creativity.

There’s a reason he was picked No. 2 overall in the 2017 NHL entry draft, even if the consensus in the Flyers draft room was to go with a defenseman like Miro Heiskanen or Cale Makar. Then-GM Ron Hextall went against the grain and took the big center who came into the previous season as the consensus No. 1 prospect available in the draft.

Going into that draft, Flyers scouts told Hextall they liked Heiskanen and Makar, both better than Patrick. Hextall’s thought process was that they had already drafted defensemen in Travis Sanheim, Ivan Provorov, Robert Hagg, etc, and so they were deep enough that they needed the best center available. A LOT of folks thought Patrick was either going to be pick #1 or pick #2 in the draft, so Hextall indeed went ahead and drafted him. It’s just a bummer looking at this list and seeing that the Flyers ended up with the only top-four guy who ended up not becoming an All Star:

Brutal.

 

Eagles: Justin Jefferson

We’ve been over this one ad nauseam, but it’s still annoying. The Vikings laughed at the Eagles when they passed on Justin Jefferson at #21 overall in the 2020 draft to go with TCU’s Jalen Reagor instead.

After two NFL seasons, here is each guy’s stat line:

  • Reagor: 64 catches for 695 yards, 3 touchdowns (plus a punt return TD)
  • Jefferson: 196 catches for 3,016 yards and 17 touchdowns

Even with kick and punt returning factored in, that added production is negligible. The Eagles whiffed pretty badly on this one… unless Reagor comes out this season looking like the second coming of Jerry Rice, which is unlikely.

 

Phillies: Ian Anderson

I’m going to amend the criteria here and go back one year further since baseball draft picks don’t often hit the majors right away.

The Phillies drafted Mickey Moniak #1 overall in 2016, but Anderson has been the most successful player taken in the top 10 that season.

Last year, Anderson went 9-5 with a 3.58 ERA, starting 24 games at age 23. He finished with a 3.9 BB/9 number and 8.7 SO/9 number and in two years is 4-0 in the playoffs with a 1.26 ERA and a World Series ring. He threw five no-hit innings against the Astros and finished fifth in NL Rookie of the Year voting.

 

Sixers: take your pick

The Sixers have struck out many times over the years, though like the Flyers with Patrick and Makar, it’s hard to kill them when they’re making consensus picks that end up not working out. Remember, at the time, Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz were universally believed to be the right moves, it’s just that those guys didn’t pan out the way everybody hoped. Throw in a draft pick to the Celtics and Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown becoming studs, and you’ve got Boston in the Finals and the Sixers sitting at home after another second round exit.

Those are the obvious choices, but I’ll go in another direction –

When the Sixers drafted and then traded Mikal Bridges in 2018, a lot of people hated the move at the time and still hate it now. But they don’t often talk about the extra first round draft pick that was gained in the process, and if that pick had gone to something other than the Tobias Harris move, maybe fans would feel differently about the aftermath.

More than Bridges, however, the biggest “what if” is missing out on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who in hindsight would have been a perfect fit for this team as a young combo guard who has seen pretty much everything improve during his four-year NBA career. This past season he averaged 24.5 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 4.5 assists per game while struggling from three. If that deep stroke comes back, and he looks like the ~37-38% shooter we saw in years one through three, then you’ve got one of the more dynamic and promising backcourt guys in the league.

 

Union: actually participating in the draft

The Union made it an organizational philosophy to opt out of the draft entirely. This began a few years ago, when they started cranking out so many solid academy products that they said to themselves, “why would we participate when the academy is producing?”

It’s a fair thought, but then you go look at their defense and two of the back five is comprised of draft picks, one guy who was #1 overall (Andre Blake) and another who was a diamond in the rough (Jack Elliott). When you look at good MLS team building, you find that squads typically explore all avenues of player development, and even though you run out of roster spots and don’t have the capacity to carry academy players AND draft picks at the same time, you just wonder if they’re missing out on a possible contributor by foregoing the draft entirely.

One of the complicating factors is that the Union have been really good recently, so their draft picks are shit. If they had top 10 picks, they’d be worth something, but rarely do guys outside the top 10 turn out to be MLS players. The best recent examples I can find are Tajon Buchanan and DeJuan Jones, who went #9 and #11 in 2019. The Union had the 13th pick that year but sent it to Cincinnati. In the previous year, they gave up their pick in the Charlie Davies trade, which ended up being New England stud Brandon Bye at #8 overall.