NHL Draft: Best draft pick of all time: Buffalo Sabres, Alexander Mogilny 1988
The Buffalo Sabres are a very hard one to choose, which is how we ended up with a player whose best days were not with the Sabres franchise. They have a lot of really good draft picks. Brian Campbell was a sixth-round pick who played well over 1,000 games as a defenseman and even played a pivotal role in the Chicago Blackhawks’ first Stanley Cup victory. Jason Pominville was a key contributor to those really good Sabres teams of the early 2000s. Sean O’Donnell broke the 1,200 game barrier as a sixth-round pick. However, none are borderline Hall of Famers like Alexander Mogilny.
Mogilny was a flier pick by the Sabres as Russian prospects were near impossible to bring over to North America. He went 89th overall in the 1988 NHL Draft. However, the Sabres pulled off some magic to bring Mogilny here after a World Juniors tournament.
After Mogilny came to the United States, he immediately made an impact. He gradually got better every season, and eventually, he scored 76 goals in the 1992-93 season. It was one of the best seasons of the early 90s by any scorer despite playing at the same time as Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, and Jaromir Jagr.
Mogilny went on to play very important seasons for the Vancouver Canucks and New Jersey Devils before playing the twilight of his career with the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was a couple of lockouts away from playing 1,000 games in the NHL, but he was still able to break 1,000 points despite playing most of his career in the dead puck era. Mogilny deserves a Hall of Fame induction and he deserves to be the pick for the Buffalo Sabres.