Hurricanes trade out of Round 1, have 7 picks heading into Day 2 of NHL Draft

Top prospects pose on the red carpet before the NHL Fraft on Friday in Los Angeles. (Damian Dovarganes / AP Photo)

MORRISVILLE — This year’s NHL Draft has a different feel, with teams staying in their home cities rather than converging on the host site, which this year is in Los Angeles.

So Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky, Associate GM Darren Yorke and the rest of the Carolina brain trust hunkered down at Lenovo’s campus in Morrisville with an NFL-style draft war room. The players, meanwhile, gathered 2,200 miles away to see their NHL dreams come true.

As different as it was, Friday’s first round was eerily familiar for the Hurricanes, who traded out of the first round for the second consecutive year and third time in the last five drafts.

Carolina dealt the 29th overall pick to the Chicago Blackhawks — the same team the Hurricanes traded their first round pick to last year — for Nos. 34 and 62 in the second round and a fifth round selection in 2027. Carolina didn’t enter the draft with a second round pick after trading it to Dallas in the Mikko Rantanen trade.

“We have several players we like in this part of the draft,” Tulsky said after Friday’s first round, “and we felt like we could slide down and still get one of the guys we’re very high on and then have an extra pick to hopefully pick up another one of the guys we’re looking at.”

The Hurricanes made a similar move last year, also with the Blackhawks and their GM, Kyle Davidson. Carolina traded the 27th overall pick for selections 34 and 50, which became defenseman Dominik Badinka and Nikita Artamonov, respectively.

Interestingly, Davidson admitted to Chicago media that he likely overpaid for the Hurricanes’ 29th pick on Friday for the opportunity to move back into the first round.

Tulsky — when he was piling up patents while writing about hockey analytics for fun at SBNation — came up with a draft pick value chart back in 2013 that continues to be relevant today.

In the Hurricanes-Blackhawks trade on Friday, Carolina’s 29th pick holds approximately a 14.8 value on Tulsky’s decade-old chart. The 34th, which the Hurricanes received from Chicago, has a value of about 11.9. Add in the 62nd pick (about 3.5) and the Hurricanes added 15.4 of draft capital, a surplus of 0.6. Toss in the fifth round pick (which is in 2027 and therefore has an uncertain value, but let’s say it comes in at 0.2), and the Hurricanes have added about 0.8 value to their original pick, the equivalent of gaining a late third or early fourth round pick.

It may not seem like much, but it’s more bullets in the chamber for Tulsky and Yorke, who runs the team’s draft.

And with the trade, the Hurricanes went from not having any second round picks in this year’s draft to holding two. Including the two second-rounders, Carolina holds seven picks on Saturday’s Day 2, which will start at noon: 87th overall (Round 3), 125th (4), 183rd (6), 189th (6) and 221st (7).

Don’t overlook those picks: The Hurricanes had nine Day 2 players suit up in at least one game last season, including Sebastian Aho, Jackson Blake, Pyotr Kochetkov, Scott Morrow, Alexander Nikishin and Jaccob Slavin.

The top five players available on NSJ’s composite list of the top 100 in the draft are Swedish center Milton Gastrin (ranked No. 19), Erie Otters winger Malcolm Spence (22nd), Edmonton Oil Kings defenseman Blake Fiddler (26th), Swedish center Jakob Ihs-Wozniak (31st) and U.S. National Team Development Program winger Jack Murtagh.