Why the NHL Draft really matters for the Hurricanes — and it’s not because of the picks

It actually doesn’t matter who the Carolina Hurricanes draft on Wednesday. Or Thursday, for that matter. They may be right, they may be crazy, but for a team in their position — they’re throwing darts at the draft, as many as they can, just hoping to hit something.

The days when they were bad enough to be able to grab a player of immediate or even imminent help — not just Eric Staal and Andrei Svechnikov, but Jeff Skinner or Elias Lindholm or Noah Hanifin — are long gone. There aren’t many of those players in any draft, and they’re certainly not still around at the end of the first round, where the Hurricanes have been drafting and will continue to draft for the foreseeable future.

We can take a moment here to appreciate the last time the draft was in Nashville, in 2003, perhaps the greatest draft class ever, when Patrice Bergeron went from the second round to the Boston Bruins’ lineup to, eventually, the Hall of Fame. The perpetual asterisk. The Hurricanes were also desperately trying, after taking Staal second overall, to trade up to take Zach Parise. The New Jersey Devils beat them to it. Instead, they took defenseman Danny Richmond with their second-round pick, the rare miss early in that particular draft. The what-might-have-beens linger.

Instead, you try to accumulate picks and hope a couple of your lottery tickets pan out, and there are certainly good and even great players to be had in the later rounds, but with far less frequency — not that there are ever any sure things in the first round, either, beyond the first few picks.

Which isn’t to say that the draft isn’t important. The success or failure of the act itself may be indefinitely deferred and delayed, but the event is a pivotal one for the shaping of next year’s roster, because the not-so-well-kept secret of the NHL draft is that what happens on the stage is the least of it. It’s everything else that makes the draft the biggest weekend of the offseason, especially for a team that at the moment is short one top-nine forward with Jesper Fast unsigned, one third-pairing defenseman and either one or two goalies.

So much of the NHL’s business happens at the draft, where all this combustible material — draft picks and contracts and dealmakers — is placed in dangerously close proximity. You can’t put this many general managers and this many agents in the same place, in the same hotel lobbies and bars and Starbucks, without accidentally striking a match or two.

That’s why so many deals are transacted over this weekend — the temporal nature of draft picks tends to add some time pressure to otherwise stalled proceedings as well — and the groundwork is laid for many of the trades and contract extensions that are hammered out over the next two months.

Since Tom Dundon bought the team, the Hurricanes have made big deals at the draft — in 2018, they told the agents for Lindholm and Hanifin before the first round that the players would be traded if they didn’t agree to the new contracts they’d been offered; the next morning, they were sent to play for Bill Peters again — and tried to be a part of every conversation, kick every tire.

In other years, under other circumstances, you can be assured they’d be trying just about anything to get into the top 10 to draft Matvei Michkov, the winger who would be a no-doubt No. 2 pick behind Connor Bedard if not for the general uncertainty about Russian players and the multiyear wait to get him over to North America — the kind of value play Dundon loves. But picking 30, that’s not realistic, even if he does get past the Washington Capitals at No. 8..

This year, they’ve poked around on Erik Karlsson, the San Jose Sharks’ reigning Norris Trophy winner, and want-away Ottawa Senators forward Alex DeBrincat, even if their salary-cap situation would make it difficult to acquire either. It’s a chance to sit down with Sebastian Aho’s agent and work on what’s likely to be an eight-year extension for their someday-in-the-future captain, one that can’t officially be agreed upon until July 1.

A deal to reacquire Tony DeAngelo from the Philadelphia Flyers, as has been discussed, will have to wait until July 8 to be finalized, one year after they traded his rights to the Flyers, to remove any cap-circumvention questions. (Whether bringing back DeAngelo to replace the exiting Shayne Gostisbehere makes sense in other ways is a very different question.)

All of which is to say, there’s a lot going on with the Hurricanes in Nashville that has nothing to do with any of the nine (or so) players they may or may not end up taking on Wednesday or Thursday.

It’s extraordinarily unlikely that any of them have any impact on what the Hurricanes’ roster looks like on October 11. It’s just as likely everything else the Hurricanes do this weekend will.

Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.

Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports