When the NHL officially returned to the Nation’s Capital in the early 90s, there was plenty of expectation regarding the revival of hockey in Eastern Canada.
The Ottawa Senators certainly provided that enthusiasm for an entire swath of hockey fans in Ontario and neighboring provinces.
But the team needed a face, a superstar that could become the poster child of that renewed era of hockey in Canada.
So, with their first pick ever, the Senators took Alexandre Daigle. Daigle was a monster in the QMJHL. In his draft year, 1992-93, Daigle torched the league. He scored 45 goals and 137 points in 53 games. The eye-popping numbers made him an offensive force that the Senators could not resist. Daigle had the makings of the superstar Ottawa needed to build its incipient franchise.
However, the Senators’ dismal on-ice performance, followed by lukewarm numbers by Daigle, led to immediate questions. While Daigle scored 20 goals and 51 points in 84 games in his rookie season, the numbers would be the pinnacle of his career. Daigle rebounded to score 26 goals and 51 points in 1996-97, but he never topped 40 points in any season of his career.
It’s the main reason why Daigle is commonly ranked among the top NHL Draft busts of all-time. The Montreal native bounced around various organizations after leaving Ottawa following a trade to the Philadelphia Flyers. In the subsequent years, Daigle appeared in games for the Tampa Bay Lightning, New York Rangers, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Minnesota Wild. Those stints also included time in the AHL.
Daigle is the ultimate story of what-if for the Senators. But the rest of the first round in the 1993 NHL Draft compounded the lamentation. Notably, Hall of Famer Chris Pronger went second overall, with Paul Kariya fourth, Adam Deadmarsh 14th, and longtime Montreal Canadiens captain Saku Koivu 21st.
Senators could have been a contender if Daigle had panned out
In an alternate dimension, Daigle would have been a 100-point player in the NHL. Had Daigle been drafted a decade earlier, he would have. But the changing tactics of the NHL in the mid-90s led to the dead era in scoring. The infamous Neutral Zone Trap started to become a thing in the late 90s and early 2000s.
But had Daigle lived up to the hype, the Senators would have been contenders from the get-go. They would have had a chance to compete in a relatively thin Eastern Conference at the time. Instead, Senators fans faced about a decade of futility until the Sens finally put everything together and became a major playoff force in the early 2000s. Suppose those Ottawa playoff squads had boasted a high-end scorer like Daigle? Those teams could have gotten past their archnemesis in Toronto.
Who knows, the Senators might have even been able to capture a Stanley Cup.
That’s something we’ll never know. Daigle remains a case study into buying the sizzle of a high-scoring Junior player. While there have been others since, Senators fans can’t help but wonder how things would have been different if Daigle and Alexei Yashin, for that matter, had turned into the generational players that they were billed to be.
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