THN Archive: Ed Jovanovski rookie success highlighted time young defensemen were highly coveted
Defensemen were selected No. 1 overall at three consecutive NHL Drafts in the mid-90s
Heading into the 1996 NHL Entry Draft, the talk was all about young defensemen.
That year, there were two blueliners who were thought of as potential top picks.
They were Chris Phillips, who ended up going first overall to Ottawa, and Andrei Zyuzin, taken second by San Jose.
The year before that, in 1995, the top three picks were all defensemen – Bryan Berard to Ottawa, Wade Redden to the Islanders and Aki Berg to Los Angeles – and in 1994, the first two players off the board were rearguards.
They were Oleg Tverdovsky, who went second to the expansion Mighty Ducks, and Ed Jovanovski, the No. 1 pick in 1994 made by the Panthers.
Jovanovski had been a rookie during the 1996 season, and his standout play received quite a bit of attention during Florida’s improbable run to the Stanley Cup Final.
In a story ahead of the 1996 NHL Draft, The Hockey News did a deep dive into what had made defenseman such a hot commodity at the time.
It came in the June 1, 1996 magazine, Vol. 49, Issue 36 in a story titled The Thick Blueline written by then-Editor-in-Chief Steve Dryden.
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