NHL Draft: Each team’s best draft pick of all time

NHL Draft: Best draft pick of all time: Anaheim Ducks, Ryan Getzlaf 2003

This might come as a surprise, but the Anaheim Ducks have a history of being really, really bad at drafting. Only three players have been drafted by the Ducks and went on to play 1,000 games in the NHL. Two of those players were drafted in the first round of the 2003 NHL Draft. Corey Perry had a great career, and he even won a Hart Trophy, but Ryan Getzlaf has been just a slightly bigger star in his time.

The Ducks took Getzlaf with the 19th-overall pick in the 2003 NHL Draft. It was actually a stacked draft, which included names like Perry, Brent Burns, Zach Parise, and Brent Seabrook going between picks 13 and 24. Getzlaf is arguably the best of the bunch, playing 1,100 games and scoring 982 points over his 16-year career.

Getzlaf helped lead the Ducks to the Stanley Cup in 2007, putting up 17 points in 21 postseason games. He put up a goal and an assist in a crucial Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals to put away the Detroit Red Wings. That wasn’t his only pivotal performance. He was an insane distributor in the 2015 postseason. He led the NHL with 18 playoff assists despite only playing 16 postseason games. The Ducks glory years were mainly thanks to Getzlaf and Perry, but Getzlaf is the one that will go down as one of the most underrated players of this era.

The only other player that really deserves even a mention is Matt Cullen. They took him in the second round of the 1996 NHL Draft, but he was just a good player for a long time. Getzlaf was a franchise-changing star that deserved more recognition than he got.