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Shane Wright’s Interviews Reportedly Led to NHL Draft Fall
Shane Wright’s NHL Draft combine interviews were deemed “detrimental” to his draft status.
In the weeks going into the 2022 NHL Draft, prospect Shane Wright was projected to be the first-overall pick. It was paraded all over NHL Network when the draft lottery was held, and the media held up his credentials over all the sports networks. When the Montreal Canadiens won the draft lottery and got the first selection, it seemed straightforward: Wright was going to be a Hab. Wright stated, “Montreal is where I want to go; it’s where I want to be.” Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes noted that he was impressed by him. It was simple until it wasn’t.
A few days before the draft, there were whispers that there was a possibility that the Canadiens wouldn’t take Wright, and he could fall to the New Jersey Devils at number two. When the draft started on July 7, and the Canadiens decided to select forward Juraj Slafkovsky, shock filled the Bell Centre in Montreal. Then Wright fell to two, then three, and then was finally selected fourth overall by the Seattle Kraken. Most people wondered how the player who was projected to be the first-overall pick in the NHL draft since he was 15 years old fell to the fourth spot. It turns out his off-ice persona could have played a role.
Related: Seattle Kraken Select Shane Wright With Fourth-Overall Pick
Chris Peters, an NHL Draft and prospect analyst, gave insight into what may have contributed to Wright’s fall on his “Talking Hockey Sense” podcast:
“Here’s the thing about Shane Wright, so, I think part of where the people started catching wind that maybe Montreal wasn’t so in love with him was after the combine. I had heard that Shane Wright’s combine did not go well on a number of fronts. The interviews were detrimental to his draft stock. That’s about as far as I would want to put it, but you know, I think that he had been the number one guy for so long that it was almost foreign to him that it was possible that anybody else could be.”
First impressions are everything and seeing that Wright may have rubbed some teams the wrong way makes all the more sense why he would drop. He didn’t receive negative reports beforehand, but no one knows what those conversations looked like behind closed doors. It’s not as though NHL teams that weren’t impressed would publicly knock the young man either.
Now that he has found his home, he has to develop and let his game do the talking for him.
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