The Athletic has live coverage of the 2023 NHL Draft

Twenty years ago, there was already a sense that the 2003 draft in Nashville could go down as one of the best in history, and not only because of the parties on Broadway at Tootsie’s and Legends.

Twenty years later, with the NHL world preparing to take over Music City again next week, that 2003 draft sentiment has surely come to fruition. Just look at the long list of impact players, stars and future Hall of Famers selected. The first round was top-heavy with players like Marc-Andre Fleury, Eric Staal, Thomas Vanek, Ryan Suter and Dion Phaneuf, but also boasted extraordinary depth, with the likes of Jeff Carter, Dustin Brown, Brent Seabrook, Zach Parise, Ryan Getzlaf and Brent Burns going between No. 11 and No. 20, and Ryan Kesler, Mike Richards and Corey Perry going between 21 and 30.

Advertisement

And then add in the Patrice Bergerons, Joe Pavelskis, Shea Webers, Dustin Byfugliens and so many other solid NHLers from the later rounds.

“This was the best draft — by far — that I’ve ever been a part of,” says Rick Dudley, who had his fingerprints all over it as the Panthers’ general manager at the time.

Dudley made headlines by trading the No. 1 overall pick to the Penguins on Day 1 of the draft. But the morning after Day 2, when the security line at Nashville Airport was hundreds deep and full of agents, scouts and executives, the only thing that could be heard were snickers over the move he tried to make.

Did you hear the Panthers tried to take that Alex Ovechkin kid like four different times, including once in the ninth round?

Forty-eight players picked in 2003 played at least 500 games, with a handful still kicking, including Fleury, who was selected No. 1 with the pick dealt by Dudley so Florida could drop down two spots and get the player they wanted, Nathan Horton, plus a second-round pick and Mikael Samuelsson.

The 48th player on that 500-game list is Tanner Glass, who will always have the greatest draft story to tell to go along with his solid 527-game career.

That’s because Glass was the Panthers’ consolation prize for not being allowed to select Ovechkin — who was the consensus pick to go No. 1 in the following year’s draft — at No. 265 in the 292-player 2003 draft.

“Some will say it was a novel idea. Some will say it was nonsense,” says Dudley, who’s back with Florida 20 years later as a senior adviser to GM Bill Zito. “I was just doing what I was instructed to do. I had gone up there nine times to Central Registry, and every time I went up there, I told them what we were planning, and they told me that not only would we not get Ovechkin but we’d lose a draft pick.

Advertisement

“It was probably wrong. It was a stupid thing to do, I guess. But Alan Cohen was a bright guy, and he thought it was worth the effort, so we did it.”

Cohen was the Panthers’ friendly and incredibly likeable owner at the time. After making his money in the pharmaceutical industry, the South Florida resident bought the hockey team a few miles from his Weston home and down the street from his Sunrise laboratory.

A few weeks before the draft, Cohen was listening in on a conversation between Dudley, then-coach Mike Keenan and the team’s scouts. Somebody blurted out that it was a shame Ovechkin wasn’t draft-eligible. After all, the Panthers owned the No. 1 pick and Ovechkin was born only two days after the cutoff date to be eligible for the 2003 draft.

Cohen’s ears perked up.

He asked if he could see the collective bargaining agreement. The language said a player must be 18 years old by Sept. 15. Ovechkin was born Sept. 17, 1985.

Cohen felt there was a technical lack of clarity in the CBA as to what constitutes a year, though. It didn’t say 18 “tropical” years, and if one took leap years into account, Ovechkin would have turned 18 four days earlier and thus have been draft-eligible.

Cohen presented his idea to Dudley and asked him to go to the league.

“The first time, I said, ‘Guys, I’m going to run something by you,'” Dudley remembers. “And they gave me about five minutes, they came back and said, ‘There’s not a chance in hell we’re going to allow that.’ So I went back to the table, talked to Alan, and I went back up again.

“I don’t know how many times, three or four, I went back up again and explained it a different way that Alan had thought of. Alan was a very inventive guy. He had an imagination, and he had all the angles covered, and there was a modicum of sense to it. The problem was they weren’t going to let it happen.”

Advertisement

Even after Dudley dealt the No. 1 pick to Pittsburgh — Dudley’s predecessor, Bryan Murray, had acquired Roberto Luongo three drafts earlier, so they didn’t need Fleury — the NHL was so worried that the Panthers would attempt to take Ovechkin at No. 3 overall, the league threatened the team with sanctions, including losing its pick.

But Cohen still wanted Dudley to make the attempt in the later rounds. Scouts at the table say Keenan, extremely close with Cohen, was fueling the fire.

“Our entire staff knew what was going on,” Dudley says. “At the end of the day, I felt a little silly because it was me that had to walk up there and keep doing it, but if you think about it, it was pretty clever.”

Ovechkin even agreed. When asked years later, Ovechkin said he had heard about the Panthers’ plot and called it “impressive, very impressive.”

Technically, the only time the Panthers officially attempted to draft Ovechkin was in the ninth round. They just wanted it on record that they were denied trying to take him.

The league at one point turned off the team’s microphone and admonished them.

The Panthers drafted Glass instead. Dudley stormed out of the arena.

“I did?” says Dudley. “I don’t know if I was mad or I just wanted to get out of there before the slew of questions that I knew would hit me.”

That’s because it was extremely unclear what was going on. The microphone had been turned off and the Panthers had to take a timeout before making the Glass selection.

“I have always wondered what happened to the refusal slip that we were provided,” says one scout who was at the table. “We had to use that to show Mr. Cohen that we at least attempted his wish.”

It wasn’t until a few hours after the draft that the story began to be pieced together by the local Panthers beat writers.

“I knew it wasn’t going to work,” Dudley says, “because if Jim Gregory looks you in the eye and says, ‘It ain’t happening, Rick,’ if Colie Campbell looks you in the eye and says, ‘It ain’t happening, Rick,’ and if Gary Bettman looks you in the eye and says, ‘It ain’t happening, Rick,’ you pretty well know it’s not happening.

Advertisement

“So I did what I had to do to find that out. When Alan first brought it up to me, I wasn’t going to just dismiss it. So I did do my due diligence and they said, ‘It ain’t happening,’ which it didn’t. But Alan thought it was worth a try.”

And 20 years later, we of course all see why. Ovechkin has become exactly the type of player you attempt to jump through so many hoops to get. He’s 73 goals from passing Wayne Gretzky’s total of 894 for first all-time.

“Let’s be honest, it was a clever thing by Alan,” Dudley says, laughing. “Alan was right. He had been on the earth enough days to be eligible for the draft. If the reverse had happened and the agent went to the league months earlier and petitioned to make Ovi draft-eligible, it would have been interesting to see what the league would have decided, if they would have made him draft-eligible and what would have happened next.”

Well, we know what would have happened next.

The Panthers wouldn’t have traded the No. 1 overall pick to Pittsburgh and would have instead used the pick on Ovechkin.

“No doubt whatsoever,” Dudley says.

It’s hard to even imagine how that would have changed the fate of the NHL and several of its franchises — Florida, Washington, Pittsburgh and Carolina, which had the second overall pick and took Staal – or the future careers of Ovechkin, Fleury, Staal and Horton.

And Glass, the ninth-round consolation prize for Florida, wouldn’t have the greatest story to tell for eternity.

“If we’d have pulled that off, we would’ve been in pretty good shape, I think,” Dudley says, laughing. “I think there would’ve been some angry people if that had happened.”

(Top illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photo: Mitchell Layton / Getty Images)