NHL Draft: One Wild pick

Well, the FanSided leadership liked my 10-second deliberation on the Number One pick in its NHL mock draft to ask me to step back in as a pinch-hitter for another team lacking a blogger on the site – The Minnesota Wild, with the Number 9 pick. Not quite as easy a task, but one I could have a little fun with.

I had coveted Nino Niederreiter – the Portland Winter Hawks winger who to me looks like a Swiss Jarome Iginla – but El Nino got snapped up just before the Wild stepped up to the podium, with the Atlanta Thrashers mock-selecting him with the eighth pick. With my budding power-forward-superstar off the board, I had to decide whether to go smart/safe or roll the dice.

I rolled the dice. They came up Kirill Kabanov.

Kabanov is listed as a left wing for the Moncton Wildcats of the QMJHL, but that’s only kinda, sorta true. He was with Moncton, and was damned good with them, until his year fell collapsed into a series of disasters that raised serious questions about the kid’s character.

Based on talent alone, scouts think Kabanov is a top-three guy in this draft, right up there with Taylor Hall and Tyler Seguin. He’s lanky, a terrific skater, dazzling with the puck. But he’s tanked on most team’s draft board because of series of horrible decisions he made this season that saw him abandon his junior team to play for Russia’s Under-18 World Championships team, only to then get dumped by the Russian squad – and then discover he wasn’t so much welcome back in Moncton anymore. For his troubles, he’s been labelled such a severe head case that a lot of people are talking late-second-round, or worse, for him.

If you take the kid at his word, he’s just a 17-year-old who got bad advice and became a political football. He left Russia to join Moncton, he says, based on assurances he would get a certain amount of ice time and power-play time. When he wasn’t getting it, he was convinced by folks back home that he should ask Moncton to let him go back to Russia to play for the Under-18 squad. But, he says, this was all a con job by Russia’s hockey czars to make an example of him – they wanted to punish him for leaving Russia’s KHL to go to Canada, and told him so privately, while publicly claiming he was a bad seed (though not disclosing anything specific that he had done to get kicked off the squad).

Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle of all this, and maybe Kabanov has been too cocky for his own good at times. But it sounds like he’s learned his lesson. Even when not playing for Moncton during the team’s playoff run, he stayed close by, said all the right things, and worked out like a fiend. His fitness scores at the NHL draft combine were outstanding. And he’s absolutely committed to playing in North America – he and his Calgary-based agents have been telling that to anyone who will listen. Unlike a lot of top Russian prospects, this guy is absolutely NOT motivated to go to the KHL – he’s burned bridges there, he doesn’t like them and they don’t like him.

If this were real life rather than mock draft, I’d prefer to trade down and hope to find him still available at the end of the first round or even early second. But since I don’t have that option, I’m selecting him here on behalf of the Wild, taking a huge talent and crossing my fingers that the character issues are overstated. He’s just too good to pass up. I’m gonna take him at his word, and hope I just made the steal of the draft.