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When Kyle Beach was selected 11th overall by the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2008 NHL draft, he was, strictly statistically speaking, three times more likely to have a Hall-of-Fame career than not play a single game in the NHL. Two years after he was taken in the draft, and while skating with the organization’s extra players during its run to the Stanley Cup, he was sexually assaulted by the team’s video coach.

Beach never played a game in the NHL, despite being under a professional contract with the Blackhawks and the New York Rangers for four seasons. In fact, he never once had an in-season call-up to the NHL. After acquiring Beach in a trade eight years ago Monday, the Rangers did not extend Beach a qualifying offer and his NHL career was over following the 2013-14 season.

So let’s start with what we know to be three unassailable facts. Beach was an 11th overall pick, he was sexually assaulted and he never played an NHL game. Was it because of the sexual assault that Beach never played in the NHL, or was he simply not a good enough player and teammate to play on what was the best team in the best league in the world? It’s impossible to prove either one definitively, but whatever compensation Beach ultimately receives from the Blackhawks, who are scheduled to enter into settlement talks with Beach next week, will undoubtedly be based on the opportunity and the earning potential that didn’t materialize after the sexual assault.

It’s a complicated question. So Hockey Unfiltered reached out to numerous NHL scouts and some of Beach’s former coaches to try to find the answers. As you can imagine, the opinions varied. Some thought Beach should have been a shoo-in to have a brief NHL career at the very least, but there were others who felt his off-ice behavior, skating deficiencies and the strength of the Blackhawks’ roster at the time would have kept him out of the NHL even if he hadn’t experienced unspeakable trauma.

“How often do you see a top-15 pick not get a second, third or even fourth chance?” one scout said. “I’ve been in this business for more than 20 years and I’ve never seen that. Guys picked that high usually get a chance to prove they can’t play in the NHL, but this guy never had that chance.”

He’s right. It’s extremely rare, though not unprecedented, that players picked among the top 15 prospects in the draft get a chance to at least wear a team’s uniform once in an NHL regular-season game. Here are the numbers:

• In the 47 NHL drafts that were held between 1972 and 2018, there were a total of 705 players chosen among the top 15 picks. A total of 686 of them (or 97.3 percent) went on to play at least one game in the NHL.

• Of the 39 drafts that were held between 1972 and 2010, there were a total of 585 players chosen among the top 15 picks. A total of 145 of them (or 24.8 percent) played or are projected to play 1,000 or more games.

• 255 (or 43.6 percent) played or are projected to play between 400 and 999 games.

• 63 (or 10.8 percent) played between 200 and 399 games, and 103 (or 17.6 percent) played between one game and 199.

• 57 (or 9.7 percent) have gone on to have Hall-of-Fame careers (or are projected to do so), while 19 (3.2 percent) didn’t play a single game.

• Beach is the only player not to have appeared in a single regular-season NHL game among the top 15 players selected from 2006 through 2018. That’s 195 players.

• Between 1972 and 2018, only three players selected higher than Beach have not played an NHL game.

• Among the top 11 picks in each draft from 1972 to 2018, only four of 517 picks (including Beach) have never played a single game in the NHL, or 0.77 percent.

“I can’t comment on how (the sexual assault) impacted him, but this young man had a lot of ability,” said TSN director of scouting and former Calgary Flames GM Craig Button. “I watched Kyle play a lot and he had a lot of very good skills and talents. There’s just no way to deny that. There’s a maturation process. I would have loved to have heard what people had to say three years ago about Jordan Binnington. ‘He’ll never play.’ A 20-year-old man, just called up to the NHL after finishing junior, gets sexually assaulted and we’re going to say he’s not a good kid? Uh-uh.”

As you’ll read, that opinion was not unanimous. There were people who loved what Kyle Beach brought to the ice and there were those who wanted nothing to do with him. This is neither a character assassination nor an attempt to make him something he wasn’t. It is simply an attempt to determine how good Beach might have been, and how things might have turned out, had he been with another organization and not suffered the trauma he did in the spring of 2010. Would he have developed into an earlier version of Tom Wilson, owner of a Stanley Cup who earns an average annual salary of $5.2 million? Would he have been a solid third/fourth-line player in the NHL? Or would his skating deficiencies and off-ice reputation have kept him out of the league?

We do know that players take time to mature and the path to steady employment in the NHL is rarely a linear one. Martin St-Louis didn’t become a full-time NHL player until he was 25 and an elite NHLer until he was 27 and now he’s in the Hall of Fame. It’s likely the best explanation we can have is this: Kyle Beach was not a perfect player. He was not an angel off the ice and he had at least one glaring on-ice deficiency in his game. He was also part of an organization that was more occupied with winning Stanley Cups than integrating young players into its lineup. It was an incredibly tough roster to crack. So what Beach needed was time. And during that time he would have either matured into an NHL player or he would have proven his inability to get to the next level. You could certainly make the argument that the sexual assault in 2010, just as he was about to embark on his professional career, was part of what robbed him of the opportunity to do that.

As Button said, think about it. You’re 20 years old, just starting your career, and you suffer a traumatic event such as this one. Not only that, you’ve reported it to your superiors in the workplace and it is handled in the way the Blackhawks chose to deal with it. Then you have to go back to perform for that employer. It’s is a confluence of events that would have an enormous impact on even the strongest individuals.

“Trauma can have an extreme range of effects, depending on the person,” said Dr. Dominique Morisano, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa. “Serious trauma like a sexual assault could have significant impacts on a person’s ability to pursue a career or move forward in a particular career path, or move forward in a particular relationship path, move forward in a particular self-care path. Sexual assault trauma is often absolutely devastating to people. It’s not just business as usual afterward.”

‘How often do you see a top-15 pick not get a second, third or even fourth chance? I’ve been in this business for more than 20 years and I’ve never seen that. Guys picked that high usually get a chance to prove they can’t play in the NHL, but this guy never had that chance.’

“Whether or not he would have been an NHLer, 150 or 200 games…it is odd that he didn’t get into a game,” another scout said. “I find that curious. It doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s a pretty staggering number. If my analytics guys brought me those numbers and I didn’t know the background, I’d be looking for some kind of trigger as to why it happened. You can never say for sure because you can’t prove a negative, but you’re talking about a kid who was failed on multiple levels by multiple people multiple times. It’s surprising the kid could have been failed at that many levels. I don’t think he was failed at the lower levels. I think he was failed at the mid- and top levels.”

Of the 30 players who were taken in the first round of the 2008 NHL draft, 21 of them are still active players, either in the NHL or Europe. (Of those who are still playing, Beach is playing at the lowest level – third division in Germany.) The 13 players who are still playing in the NHL earn an average annual salary of $5.2 million. So if things had worked out differently for Beach, there is little doubt he would have been a very wealthy man. In order to determine whether that might have happened, we’ll look at various aspects of Beach’s career from the year before he was drafted until he left the NHL.

Growing up in Kelowna, Beach was a talented prospect who caught the eyes of Western Hockey League scouts early. He went 10th overall in the league’s 2005 Bantam Draft to the Everett Silvertips. It’s interesting to note that of the 208 players who were selected that year, only 11 went on to play 100 or more career games in the NHL. Jordan Eberle, the highest-scoring NHLer in that draft, went 126th, and Tyler Johnson, who won two Stanley Cups with the Tampa Bay Lightning, went 201st. It has long been established that where a player is drafted in major junior hockey is not a great indicator of future success, especially in the WHL, which drafts players as 15-year-olds. But is beyond dispute that Beach was one of the best major junior prospects in Western Canada.

And he lived up to that billing in his first two years in the league. As a 16-year-old rookie in 2006-07, Beach scored 29 goals and 61 points and piled up 194 penalty minutes, the fifth-highest in the league and first among rookies. He was named WHL rookie of the year and was named to the Canadian Hockey League all-rookie team.

“His skating would have been an issue, but Kyle found ways to be effective in a game,” said John Becanic, the Silvertips’ assistant coach during Beach’s rookie season. “He could turn a game with a fight, he could turn a game with a big hit, he could turn a game just by having the entire opposing team hating him. I’ve never seen a guy get more spears, more slashes. He loved the fact that he could have five guys on the ice all wanting to punch him out at once. And he could do that. And that’s the Tom Wilson effect.”

But there were times when Beach would go over the line on and off the ice. He quickly developed a reputation for lacking discipline and clashing with authority. He dropped to 10th in the WHL draft largely because of his reputation for being a hothead. While playing Under-16 hockey, he was suspended six games for a series of on-ice incidents and another six by the British Columbia Amateur Hockey Association for bumping a referee during a tournament. Beach was called up by the Silvertips for the playoffs in 2006 and got into a fight with future NHLer Milan Lucic after he made a mocking, hunch-backed gesture at Lucic, who was born with a slight curvature of the spine. “I do worry about my reputation a little bit,” Beach told the late Jason Botchford of the Vancouver Province in the summer of 2007. “Everyone tells me that it’s going to catch up with me, that it will bite me in the rear end eventually. But I’m not there yet.”

Beach was part of the team that Hockey Canada sent to the 2007 Ivan Hlinka Tournament in the Czech Republic, but his tenure there was not without incident. During a scrimmage in the selection camp, things became so heated between Beach and teammate Colten Teubert that Teubert dropped his gloves and charged at Beach. A scout said that during the tournament, Beach was not happy with the ice time he and his fellow WHL and Quebec Major Junior Hockey League players were getting, so he came out for practice one day with ‘Team Ontario’ blazoned across the back of his sweater. Beach registered one assist in four games and Canada finished fourth. When it came time to select the Canadian team for the 2008 Under-18 World Championship later that season, Hockey Canada left Beach off the roster and went on to win the gold medal.

The 2007-08 season was his NHL draft year and Beach was proving to be a dominant player in in Everett. Even though his scoring totals weren’t as high as his rookie season – 27-33-60 in 60 games – he added 222 PIM to his total. Scouts who were looking for the best 2008 draft-eligible players were polarized on Beach. Some saw a tantalizing, 6-foot-3, 200-pound future power forward who could score and fight, others an undisciplined, high-maintenance player who might not be worth the headaches.

One scout said that his team had done its homework on Beach and found there were some off-ice indiscretions, and when they asked Beach about them they found him to be a little less than forthcoming. “He was an immature kid,” the scout said. “The stuff he did was immature, idiotic, 17-year-old kid stuff. The problem is it was repetitive and he didn’t seem to be learning from it. There was never anything that would be considered a major incident, but it was a volume of immature and repetitive mistakes that he didn’t seem to learn from.” Another scout said he was at an Everett game during Beach’s draft year and was shocked by what he saw. “He’s standing on the blueline for the national anthem and he’s verbally berating a guy across the ice with the worst profanity possible,” the scout said. “And basically, the whole rink is hearing this because there’s dead silence except for the national anthem being played. Just one stupid, boneheaded decision after another.”

But again, getting back to the maturing process, who is to say that Kyle Beach would not have figured things out and realized what it took to be a pro? “What would Lou Lamoriello have done for this kid?” one scout asked. “What kind of accountability would he have had for him? What kind of support would he have created for him?”

To be sure, there are all kinds of players with checkered pasts who went on to succeed. Partly because of the trauma he suffered in junior hockey, Daniel Carcillo admits he was a terrible teammate as a young man. But he went on to play 400-plus games and won two Stanley Cups. Sean Avery played almost 600 NHL games and made almost $20 million in career earnings, despite being a constant distraction. Sheldon Keefe, under the influence of the notorious David Frost, was a terrible human being as a young man. And now he’s one of the most respected coaches in the NHL.

Going into the draft, The Hockey News had Beach pegged as the 10th-best prospect. Here’s is what it had to say about him in its annual Draft Preview:

Beach actually came very close to making the Blackhawks out of training camp and immediately rocketed to No. 2 on the organization’s prospect list, according to THN’s 2009 Future Watch edition:

In the WHL, meanwhile, Beach was continuing his dominating ways for an Everett team that was in rebuilding mode. “From him to our next-best player on our team,” Becanic said, “if (Beach) was a 10, our next-best player might have been a 6-1/2 or a seven.” Beach was also gaining a notorious reputation throughout the league, both with players and league administrators. “Kyle was the player whom every player in the league hated because he played on the edge 24/7,” Becanic said. “You loved having him on your team, but you hated playing against him. He was that player who played on the edge, but he was also a player who could go out and score four goals in a game because he was just so physically superior to players at that time. There just weren’t a lot of players like him. But I was on the phone with (WHL vice-president) Richard Doerksen every week. There were points when where I was like, ‘Man, you make my life hard because of your undisciplined actions.’ And no coach wants to deal with that.”

In the middle of the 2008-09 season, the Silvertips traded Beach to the Lethbridge Hurricanes, who were contending for a league title, in exchange for a package of prospects and draft picks. Beach had 33 points in 24 games for his new team, but just a goal and two points in 10 playoff games. After the season, he was assigned to the Rockford IceHogs, the Blackhawks’ farm team, for their playoff run, but he and fellow prospect Akim Aliu were sent home after getting involved in a food fight over whether the OHL or WHL was the better league. “I think we almost fought in the parking lot,” Beach said at the time.

Facing a rebuild of their own, the Hurricanes traded Beach to the Spokane Chiefs in the summer of 2009 for his last year of junior hockey, a season in which Beach was an absolute beast. He led the WHL with 52 goals, then added seven more in seven playoff games. Former Chiefs coach Hardy Sauter said Beach instantly endeared himself to his new teammates, all of whom had hated him as an opponent. “He was a good player and a good guy,” Sauter said. “He was so annoying. He was trouble to play against. But then if he’s on your team, all of a sudden not so bad. The one year we had him, he came to the rink every day, he worked, he was part of the group. He had way more compete in him than he wanted people to know.” But what concerned Sauter was that his skating deficiencies were not improving. “Guys like Wes Walz, Jared Cowen, Mikael Backlund, Bill Lindsay and Jared Spurgeon,” Sauter said. “They all played with and against (Beach) in the same timeframe and they were all able to make that next jump because they were better in terms of mobility.”

After the Chiefs were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, Beach was sent to Rockford, then to Chicago to join the Blackhawks for their playoff run, one that would result in them winning their first Stanley Cup since 1961. And that was when everything changed for him.

In his first pro season in Rockford, Beach put up decent totals with 16 goals and 36 points in 71 games, and he continued his on-ice belligerent ways with 163 PIM. But it was clear that the skating deficiencies were becoming more noticeable at the higher level. “Even in the East Coast League and the American League or in an NHL training camp, you’d notice that he was a little slower,” Sauter said. “If you’re at training camp and you’re doing laps and you’re the last guy noticeably by five or 10 feet, those things get noticed, especially when the game is going from big and strong to quick and pursue.”

Mark Bernard, who was Rockford’s GM in Beach’s rookie season, said Beach’s adjustment to pro hockey was not unlike what a lot of high-scoring juniors experience. “You can’t expect him to come into pro hockey and have even a 27-28 goal year,” Bernard said after that season. “I think Kyle made strides in a lot of areas. The one thing Kyle can bring that none of our other players can bring is that he gets under the other team’s skin and he’s very good at it. He has a fantastic shot and if he can get to the open area, he can shoot the puck like nobody else.”

Beach got off to a good start in his second season, scoring three goals and six points in eight games before suffering a shoulder injury that would require surgery. By the end of his second season, he had fallen to seventh on the Blackhawks’ prospect list. Even though Beach came back with a 16-goal, 204 PIM season in Rockford, it was clear he was no longer going to be a prospect for the Blackhawks, who that season were one of the most dominant teams in NHL history and won their second Stanley Cup in four years. By that time, Beach had dropped out of the team’s top 10 list of prospects entirely. He was signed to a lowball one-year deal in the summer of 2013, then was dealt to the Rangers midway through the 2013-14 season and fell off the map. By the next season he was in Europe, where he still plays today.

So armed with that timeline, we’re back to our original question. How good could Kyle Beach have been? Could he have been an NHL player had he not been traumatized, even with his skating deficiencies? John Becanic has been thinking about that a lot lately. Long before going to the WHL, he was working with the Soo Greyhounds of the OHL when Chris Simon was dealt there in the 1991-92 season. And he sees some parallels between Beach and Simon, who played 782 games in the NHL. “Your question to me was, ‘Was (Beach) good enough to play in the NHL’ and my response is yes,” Becanic said. “Chris Simon’s feet were no better than Kyle Beach’s. If you look at their numbers in major junior, there’s not a whole lot of difference. The undisciplined part was not a secret. There won’t be a person in the Western Hockey League that won’t tell you that. And the Blackhawks knew that, let’s be honest. They didn’t draft him not knowing that.”

Here is another rather blunt assessment from another scout: “This is one where I feel very confident telling you that this guy did not not become a player because of this incident.” And another: “He possessed unique traits that do not usually accompany higher-end players. He had a unique toughness, unique physicality, meanness and bite. The perception of Kyle throughout the league was that if he could figure it out, he’d be a top-six forward.”

Kyle Beach never did make it to the NHL. He was on the cusp of doing so, making his way through the thinnest part of the bottleneck when his life was changed forever. And instead of finishing his NHL career with a fortune in the bank, he’s playing for something called the TecArt Black Dragons in Erfurt, Germany. He had 60 points in 36 games last season and has 11 points in 12 games this season. He won two Austrian League titles and the hockey website www.eliteprospects.com, for some reason, lists him as a Cult/Star Player for DVTK Jagesmedvek in Slovakia, despite the fact he played just one season there.

And that’s about as good as it got for Beach. And we’re left to wonder what might have been for a young man who had the most unspeakable thing happen to him at a time when the sky was the limit when it came to potential.

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