Whatever Happened to the Canadiens' 26th Overall Pick:

Every draft has a name that felt like a sure thing at the time and just never got there. For Montreal, that's Nikita Scherbak. Taken 26th overall in 2014, scouts loved the tools — a dynamic, playmaking winger with real offensive instincts, someone THW compared to Marián Gaborik and TSN compared him to Jakub Voráček. That's the kind of company that gets fans excited on draft night.

The catch was always development. Scherbak was widely seen as a legit project, a guy who needed real seasoning before he'd be ready for a full-time NHL role. Sound familiar? It's actually the exact same profile some scouts worried about with David Pastrnak before he broke out. The difference is Pastrnak turned into a superstar. Scherbak didn't.

Scherbak struggled in the NHL but began to improve in the Canadiens’ farm system.

He put up big numbers in junior, then slowly improved in the AHL, flashing real promise in a short third-line stint with Montreal late in the 2017-18 season. But he couldn't stick around the next year, got claimed off waivers by the Kings, and didn't give LA much reason to keep him either. The tools were never really the issue. His problem was processing the game quickly enough to survive in a top-six role, and he never earned enough trust to hang on in a lower role in the lineup either.

So where's he now? Honestly, about as far from an NHL rink as you can get while still playing professional hockey. Scherbak's spent years bouncing around Europe. He has played in the KHL with Omsk and Chelyabinsk, then in various leagues in Slovakia and France, and now in Austria, where he currently plays for EC VSV. He's 30 now, still lacing them up, just doing it a long way from the bright lights he was drafted into back in 2014.

Some prospects make it to the NHL, and some simply don’t.

It's a good reminder of how thin the line really is in prospect evaluation. Scherbak and David Pastrnak received scouting reports with some striking similarities — high-upside, high-risk wingers who needed time. One became a perennial 40-goal scorer with the Boston Bruins. The other became a cautionary tale about how badly even a talented, well-regarded prospect can miss when the speed of the NHL game just doesn't click.

One spot on a draft board can separate a franchise cornerstone from a player few fans remember a decade later — and sometimes, that gap has nothing to do with talent at all.