OHL Draft Recap

There weren't many big surprises in today's OHL Draft, at least from an American/NCAA perspective. The battle lines have been drawn pretty clearly with the NCAA no longer chasing after young Canadian players until after they go through the draft process and rebuff the team that drafts them, and the NTDP doing a good job of locking down top American talent early.

As a result, things went pretty much how we expected. Sasha Chemelevski was the first American drafted, going 10th overall to Sarnia.

The latter part of the first round saw a lot of interesting names for off the board. Shattuck-St. Mary's top U16 defenseman this year, Brady Lyle, was selected 18th overall by his hometown team of North Bay. At 19th overall, Boston College commit Jacob Tortora was selected by Barrie. It's a bad sign to see a team use a first round pick on a committed player, but Barrie isn't a team traditionally known for luring top college-committed players. It will be interesting to see how that one plays out.

Chemelevski's Honeybaked teammate Ivan Lodnia was the next player taken at 20th overall by Erie. That seems like a steal for Erie if they can get him to report, as Lodnia was easily a top-10 talent. Finally, Detroit Belle Tire's Jack Studnicka was taken 21st by Oshawa. Studnicka was technically listed as an American on the OHL Draft website, but originally comes from Canada, and with an older brother playing in the OHL, it's highly expected that he will report to the OHL.

After that, no Americans were selected in the second round of the Draft. It wasn't until the third round when teams started to gamble a bit on very talented American players. Miami commit Cole Coskey was selected 47th overall by Saginaw, and Michigan commit and NTDP signee Quinn Hughes was selected 49th by Sarnia. That's early, but those are fairly significant drops relative to their talent level, so probably not a huge cause for concern at the moment.  Finally, New Jersey U16 D Anthony DeMeo was selected with the last spot in the third round.