Jason Bukala

So you knew he was going to draft Nathan McKinnon at one.

That was going to be a no brainer.

I have to be honest, we were kind of splitting hairs a little bit in the war room, if you will.

Anyways, Barkov was so impressive.

And as soon as we were really comfortable with him, we knew we were going to call his name.

And we weren't disappointed in the least.

Now, we took a lot of calls for that second draft slot, a lot of calls, even on the floor.

You know, the teams behind us, especially Nashville, were very aggressive trying to get up to number two.

The following year in Philadelphia, when we took Ekblad one, same thing.

Philly as the host, they offered us quite a bit to try and get all the way up to number one.

And Dale Tallon,

our general manager, who's there working as an advisor with the Canucks to his credit and his vision, really his vision, um, he stuck true to his beliefs.

And that was a, we were going to build through the middle and we were going to build through right shot defense, but if possible, and that's exactly what happened.

And, uh,

It worked out fine.

It worked out great for them long term, for sure.

I think San Jose is going to be active trying to either get to one and get a player, but they don't have to.

I think they're going to be more in line to potentially trade back because their target for me is

without having any inside knowledge in their draft room, they need a right-shot defenseman probably more than anybody in the top five.

Now, having said that, when you're the Vancouver Canucks right now, you want to just draft the best available player, period, and you want to get somebody that's going to move the needle for a long period of time.