Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

The selection process at the NHL Entry Draft quite often serves as a preview of the upcoming junior hockey season.

The NHL draft is intended to cure what ails sickly NHL also-rans. That much is plain. It's also the best measure of the health of the major junior leagues.

The draft gives you a work-up on the vital signs of WHL, OHL and QMJHL and the most vital of all signs are the leagues' top-end talent. If these leagues are attracting and developing elite teenagers, then all is well.

OHL: Most presume that the major-junior season starts taking shape in late August when players are reporting to training camps and exhibition games commence. In fact, the year commences with the NHL draft. You can get a good read of how the standings might shake down when NHL general managers start calling out names on the arena floor.

Look at last year. The first four picks were all drawn from the O, along with three others in the top 10:

1. Steven Stamkos from Sarnia

2. Drew Doughty from Guelph

3. Zach Bogosian from Peterborough

4. Alex Pietrangelo from Niagara

8. Mikkel Boedker from Kitchener

9. Josh Bailey from Windsor

10. Cody Hodgson from Brampton

Safe to say that in this one-draft sampling the O doesn't look to have a problem attracting talent, just keeping it past the age of 18. At the time you could have only really counted on Stamkos sticking in the NHL, in part due to his talent, in part due to Tampa Bay's Seen Stamkos? marketing campaign. Hard to ask the question if you weren't going to give fans an opportunity in the coming season. I don't know that many could have confidently predicted that Doughty, Bogosian, Boedker and Bailey would stick with the clubs that had drafted them; in fact, I'm sure that a lot of draftniks and junior hockey fans were surprised that Bailey was selected by the Islanders at No. 9.

The logic of giving those players a heavy dose of NHL hockey at the age of 18 is debatable in all but Stamkos's and Doughty's cases -- they might have had struggles, but by season's end they really looked like they made the transition successfully.

What are the merits of having Bodeker and Bailey hanging around to score 11 and seven goals respectively? I can see any -- better to let them have success in juniors.

What are the risks of rushing kids? Injury is the obvious one, as 18-year-olds are rarely physically ready to deal with the speed and level of contact in the man's league--Bogosian, Pietrangelo in his brief stint with the Blues and Bailey all missed significant time.

The OHL's season really took shape that Friday night last June in Ottawa. Looking back at it now, it's hardly a coincidence that second round of the OHL playoffs featured only one team that sent a player directly pros. It's hard to withstand the loss of a talent at that level.(It's truly scary to think how good Windsor would have been if the Islanders had sent Bailey back to them.)

If the draft had shaken down differently, the shape of the OHL season might have looked very different. If the Islanders had nabbed Hodgson at No. 9 and kept him around, Brampton might have been in a race just to make the playoffs -- that was exactly the Battalion's position before Hodgson returned from his time with the Canucks. (I suppose the Canadian team at the world juniors might have looked a lot different and maybe even struggled more mightily without Hodgson.)

What happens this year? Well, consensus is that the first two North American players who'll be selected will be London's John Tavares and Brampton's Matt Duchene. It's no great leap to presume, no matter how the first three picks in the draft play out, that both won't be back.

Maybe the Battalion brass is holding out faint hope that Colorado will land Duchene at No. 3 and send him back to the junior ... but that's hard to see. A longshot. Any other scenario will send him to the NHL next season and for Brampton this means it's back to square one. The expected loss of Hodgson, Duchene and Evgeni Grachev to the Rangers means it will be a rebuilding season. Factor in goaltender Thomas McCollum moving on. Making the playoffs would be a win for Battalion coach Stan Butler.

London might be better able to withstand to loss of Tavares but even the Knights will be dealt a body blow if they wind up losing Nazem Kadri to the NHL.Maybe some junior fans don't see it -- Kadri, for all his skill, looks like a pretty slight kid and would need to fill out to be truly NHL-ready. Still, his sticking in the pros this fall seems about as likely as did Josh Bailey spending last season with the Islanders. You just can't rule it out if he goes to a team that finished out of the playoffs, which is how it should shake out. And if London struggled with a younger Windsor team last season, it looks even more daunting a season later for the Knights without Tavares and Kadri.

WHL: As it was with Bailey, so was it with Luke Schenn. Kelowna made the Memorial Cup final without Schenn and he had a significantly bigger impact with Toronto than Bailey did on Long Island. Will Vancouver get Evander Kane back? Or will Kane be drafted by Atlanta, as most expect, and rushed into the Thrashers' line-up? The Giants, like the London Knights, have a way of rebuilding on the fly -- a bad season for them is a decent season for many others. Still, Kane might score 60 goals, maybe more if he goes back to Vancouver this year and there's no reasonable facsimile that the Giants can drum up. They look like one team with Kane and another without him.

And then there's Brayden Schenn and Scott Glennie, the core talents of the Memorial Cup host Brandon Wheat Kings. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the Wheat Kings could lose both to the NHL. Brian Burke has already declared his affection for the Schenns--Luke is untradeable, Brayden is targeted (or at least reasonably targeted if the Leafs' GM can't trade into the top three). If Toronto can manoeuvre into the four- or five-slot and take Brayden he and his brother can start shopping for a condo to share. Meanwhile, Glennie is more of a projection but, truth be told, if Josh Bailey can stick at 18, so can he. Not that it's the best thing for either player, and not that the potential of immediate returns on investment justify the physical and developmental risks. But if both are in the NHL, the Wheat Kings won't look so formidable and that's not just bad news for Brandon boss Kelly McCrimmon but for the CHL. The end-of-season show would be a lot better if thsoe two are on hand.

Then there's the case of Jared Cowan. The Spokane defenceman might have been in the mix to land in the top three if he didn't tear up his knee in January. Over the years I've learned that you can go wrong under-estimating NHL general managers' desperation to get some sort of immediate returns from their draft. Ditto for their blinding desperation to hold onto their jobs.

QMJHL: The Q seems less in danger of losing players directly to the NHL. The league's best prospect, Drummondville defenceman Dmitry Kulikov, is likely to fall somewhere between No. 7 and No. 16. I know that's a wide range. I suspect that he'll go to Dallas at No. 8 and I know that the Stars did a pretty rigorous work-up on him. I can't possibly see him getting by Columbus who'll have to spend a first-round on a defenceman one of these days. Kulikov should be back with the Q champs ... but then again you never know.

The good news for the Q is that there will be players drafted out of the league on Friday this year. You can bank on Kulikov. Rimouski's big right winger Jordan Caron might last until No. 20 but not much after that. Shawinigan forward Philippe Paradis and Saint John defenceman Simon Depres could both hear their names called in the first 30 -- although Depres's stock fell in the second half of the season and many scouts and execs question his conditioning and make-up. No matter how it plays out, it has to be better for the Q than last year.

Nothing could be worse for the Q than the 2008 draft. Not one Quebec league player was selected in the first round. There were kids selected out of the Minnesota high school system, Alberta Junior A and even Ontario Junior B, but none from the league that sent Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby to the NHL. Not even a goaltender from what was considered the cradle of elite netminders.

In fairness, the dominoes started to fall for the Q in the second round, seven picks in all. If the NHL had a do-over on the 2008 draft at least one organization might figure out a way to scoop up Rimouski's Patrice Cormier in the first round. Atlanta would have to give it strong consideration because the kid the Thrashers took out of St Catharines' Junior B, Daultan Leveille, flat-lined in the NCAA last season. Was it a bad year in the Q? Yeah. Was the league under-scouted? Probably by some.

All things in hockey are cyclical. A lot of smart hockey men would make a case that we were bound to see an uptick in the level of the game in the last 10 to 15 years simply because baby boomers' children were children were coming of age -- a demographic and actuarial approach, dry as toast, I know, but you argue against it. All pockets of the game have up years and down years. No one is fully immune, but those who are most exposed are the areas with population working against it. The Q is exposed on those counts more than the other two major junior leagues. The Q has a smaller pool to draw from and it's less likely than the O and the Dub to get a boost from an influx of U.S. kids in neighbouring regions.