The 2012 NHL Draft class, 10 years later: What went wrong at the top?

How good was the 2012 NHL Draft class?

Not bad at all, turns out. It yielded the best goalie of a generation in Andrei Vasilevskiy, not to mention Connor Hellebuyck, amounting to two Vezina Trophy winners. It gave us high-end offensive defenseman Morgan Rielly, Lady Byng Trophy winner Jaccob Slavin and two-time Stanley Cup-winning netminder Matt Murray. It gave us power forward Tom Wilson, two-way maven Tomas Hertl and punishing hitter Jacob Trouba.

It was the Hampus Lindhom draft class and the Filip Forsberg draft class and the Teuo Teravainen draft class and the Matt Dumba draft class. And yet: 10 years later, the 2012 group is arguably best known for its flops at the top. Round 1 would almost make more sense if you read it backwards, as the second half of the round had as many hits as the first half.

As for picks one to four, however: 2012 delivered one of the all-time worst harvests. How bad do Nail Yakupov, Ryan Murray, Alex Galchenyuk and Griffin Reinhart look now? It gets really ugly if you compare them to other top fours in the past decade.

2012 Draft
1. Nail Yakupov
2. Ryan Murray
3. Alex Galchenyuk
4. Griffin Reinhart

2013 Draft
1. Nathan MacKinnon
2. Aleksander Barkov
3. Jonathan Drouin
4. Seth Jones

2014 Draft
1. Aaron Ekblad
2. Sam Reinhart
3. Leon Draisaitl
4. Sam Bennett

2015 Draft
1. Connor McDavid
2. Jack Eichel
3. Dylan Strome
4. Mitch Marner

2016 Draft
1. Auston Matthews
2. Patrik Laine
3. Pierre-Luc Dubois
4. Jesse Puljujarvi

2017 Draft
1. Nico Hischier
2. Nolan Patrick
3. Miro Heiskanen
4. Cale Makar

2018 Draft
1. Rasmus Dahlin
2. Andrei Svechnikov
3. Jesperi Kotkaniemi
4. Brady Tkachuk

2019 Draft
1. Jack Hughes
2. Kaapo Kakko
3. Kirby Dach
4. Bowen Byram

2020 Draft
1. Alexis Lafreniere
2. Quinton Byfield
3. Tim Stutzle
4. Lucas Raymond

2021 Draft
1. Owen Power
2. Matty Beniers
3. Mason McTavish
4. Luke Hughes

The top fours in the years immediately following the 2012 class run circles around it. It’s early to evaluate the more recent draft classes, but they look well on their way to outproducing 2012 in the top four.

What makes the 2012 class fascinating is that there were great players picked — even in the first round, even within the top 10. So why did teams specifically whiff so badly on Yakupov, Murray, Galchenyuk and Griffin Reinhart? Daily Faceoff spoke to some NHL team executives who were in key decision-making roles on the scouting side for the 2012 draft to glean what the general consensus was on each kid at the time – and why none of them panned out as expected.

Pick 1: Nail Yakupov, RW, Edmonton Oilers

"Fail for Nail" was the accepted tanking mantra among fans for 2011-12. While Yakupov wasn’t perceived as lapping the field, he was the clear favorite to go No. 1, blessed with some dazzling puck skills. One NHL team executive admits he felt Rielly, who went fifth overall, was the most exciting player in the draft class, but he also scratches his head on Yakupov, whom he liked at the time, claiming he still to this day doesn’t understand what went wrong. It didn’t always seem like it was going to go that way. By 2012-13, Yakupov was captaining Russia at the world juniors, and he even scored 17 goals in 48 games as a rookie with the Edmonton Oilers, finishing fifth in the Calder Trophy vote during the shortened NHL season.

Leading up to the 2012 Draft, though, some scouts saw a profile that resembled Swiss cheese: appetizing but with some obvious holes.

“He was a really, really skilled player and obviously could skate, but there were some concerns about trying to do too much on his own — a lot of 1-on-1 type of play,” said one NHL team executive.

Another executive remembers Yakupov as a player who built too much of his game around escapability and using his skill to avoid battling for pucks. The problem: you have to be truly elite to play that way, and Yakupov wasn’t, so he ended up too disengaged from the action. His first three seasons with the Oilers were his “best,” and he graded out as an adequate to slightly above-average forward when it came to scoring-chance generation, but he also ranked near the top of the league in giveaways per 60 minutes at 5-on-5. Per naturalstattrick, among 374 NHL forwards who played at least 1,000 minutes over that three-season stretch, Yakupov had the fifth-highest expected goal against per 60. He got caved in. He had plenty of skill, but his defensive shortcomings were his undoing. The Oilers traded him in October 2016 for Zach Pochiro, a player so obscure that he has barely sniffed the AHL, let alone the NHL, in his career.

Pick 2: Ryan Murray, D, Columbus Blue Jackets

Murray’s profile leading up to draft day 2012 was almost the inverse of Yakupov’s. Whereas Yakupov was flashy and unpredictable, Murray was safe. He never got too high or too low. The upside of that: he was a projectable NHL talent.

“He was mature for his age, probably a Chris Phillips type of pick is what people thought,” said one team executive. “He was going to be a really good all-around, two-way guy, good penalty killer, but probably not that high-end offensive defenseman. And there were probably some defensemen that went later, after him, that were higher skill. But they had more of a risk factor to them, too. Ryan had less of a risk factor. It was, ‘This guy’s going to play, and he’s going to play a long time and have the potential be a captain on a team.’ That sort of thing, two-way guy, maybe second power play.”

But the downside of such a safe profile is that Murray’s game really didn’t pop in the eyes of some scouts.

“You could sense, OK, he’s going to be a real good NHL player for a long time, you’re going to get a guy who plays for 15 years, he’s going to be a top-four guy, play top-four minutes,” said another team executive. “But you weren’t leaving the rink excited. Don’t make any mistake about Ryan Murray: I don’t think there’s any top scouts who projected him to be a top NHL player. He was going to be a steady guy who played major minutes, made a good first pass, did his work.”

Murray’s solid if unremarkable two-way play has come close to meeting that standard at times in his 432-game career, but he hasn’t been on the ice enough to justify his status as a player chosen No. 2 overall by the Columbus Blue Jackets. Injuries have plagued him. He has played 82 games in one NHL season and no more than 66 in any other. He was a healthy scratch for the Colorado Avalanche’s run to winning the 2021-22 Stanley Cup this season.

And the reality, according to one executive who scouted the 2012 Draft class? The health risk was there all along. Murray suffered multiple injuries during his major junior career, from an ankle sprain to a separated shoulder, and he missed the World Junior Championship due to injury in 2013. Whereas players like Galchenyuk and Rielly were coming off major injuries in 2012 as well, Murray had history of getting hurt again and again, and the bad luck followed him into his pro career.

Pick 3: Alex Galchenyuk, C, Montreal Canadiens

A torn ACL limited Galchenyuk to just two regular-season games during the 2011-12 major junior season, but teams were tantalized regardless after he ripped off 83 points in 68 games for the Sarnia Sting as an underager the season prior. There was no debating his skating and hands. But there were questions, even 10 years ago, about his ability to use his brain to maximize his talents.

One executive saw similar profiles between Galchenyuk and his Sarnia teammate Yakupov. Galchenyuk was a powerful skater but didn’t concentrate enough on his play away from the puck.

Another executive felt the early scouting reports on Galchenyuk were deceiving — specifically because of the timeline when evaluating him, starting with the year before he was due to be drafted.

“We were excited about him, because of his skill level, his flashes, his 1-on-1 ability. Nobody had dug into his hockey sense at that point,” the executive said. “Because nobody had really watched him. When he’s an underage, you watch flashes of him out of the corner of your eye, and you’re like, ‘F--- yeah,’ and you write about him, but you don’t dig in and see the bad stuff as a player because you’re concentrating on the other draft eligibles in the game that you have to draft that year. So when you see an underager and he shows spurts, you write, ‘He’s going to be a good player and I’m gonna go back and visit him.’ ”

Scouts did go back to watch Galchenyuk at the Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament (since renamed the Hlinka-Gretzky Cup) in 2011 but, as the executive pointed out, it’s a summer tournament, so certain kids who put a lot of time into offseason skills training tend to stand out more, which can inflate their value before other prospects get up to game speed in the fall. The way he sees it, a player who looks like the best in his draft class at the Hlinka can sometimes be a fourth-rounder by the time the draft rolls around. And Galchenyuk was particularly hard to evaluate because he blew out his knee only a few games into the 2011-12 OHL season.

“You knew he had skill but you didn’t know the other things about him,” the executive said. “There was that risk in taking him. You could’ve hit it out of the ballpark, he could’ve been the best player, but you didn’t know him as well.”

Galchenyuk certainly showed flashes early on in his NHL career with the Canadiens, including a 30-goal breakout in 2015-16, but his inability to pick up defensive assignments and improve how he thought the game has made him a tough player to coach. He’s played for six different NHL franchises since 2017-18.

Pick 4: Griffin Reinhart, D, New York Islanders

“Where is he now? I honestly don’t even know,” admitted one NHL team executive.

Neither did I. So I looked it up. Griffin Reinhart played the 2021-22 season with the Belfast Giants of the UK Elite Ice Hockey League.

“Wow,” the executive said. “Unbelievable. Because his father was so good, I thought he was going to be, too.”

Perhaps that’s what skewed the scouting reports on Reinhart. His father Paul made quite an impression on the Calgary Flames’ blueline in the 1980s. Everyone saw the pedigree and the big body and figured Griffin was can’t-miss. One team executive liked the toolbox — the mobility for a 6-foot-3, 200-plus-pound horse of a defenseman, the big shot. Though he had one reservation even at the time.

“He could’ve shown more energy — he was pretty laid back,” the executive said. “Whereas you saw a Morgan Rielly who was, just take the puck and jump in the play and go drive that offense. Griffin was safe even though he had all those really good attributes. Kind of a mystery.”

Another executive was never sold. After an area scout gushed, the executive went to see Reinhart and had questions about his hockey sense and ability to read plays without chasing the puck. Most of all, though, he wasn’t convinced Reinhart was passionate about hockey.

“Most times when you miss on guys, it’s because, inside them, they don’t really want to be hockey players,” the executive said. “If you’d sit and have a cup of coffee with him, you’d figure that out rather quickly. To be an NHL hockey player, you have to have the thought constantly ticking in your brain that you’re an NHL player. Everything you do has to be about that. Some guys, they don’t really want to be hockey players. Their head pulled them elsewhere, whether it’s video games, drinking, weed, partying. One guy I remember who didn’t pan out loved to go motocrossing. I think with Griffin, he had a little bit of that — his interests lied elsewhere.”

Now 28, Reinhart has just 37 NHL games to his name. He’s tumbled from the NHL to the AHL to the KHL to the German League to the UK League, while his younger brother Sam, chosen second overall in 2014, continues to flourish as a top-six NHL forward.

So what went wrong with the 2012 quartet? We can chalk it up to bad luck in a draft class that would yield plenty of stars, but the truth was that, if we looked close enough, the warning signs were always there for Yakupov, Murray, Galchenyuk and Reinhart.