Jonathan Ericsson: Last Player Selected in 2002 NHL Draft, “Big E”

On November 16 & 17, the Detroit Red Wings will face off against the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators at Avicii Arena in Stockholm, Sweden as part of the 2023 NHL Global Series. To commemorate this historic event and pay tribute to Detroit's Swedish connection, each week leading up to the Global Series, we will feature a Swedish Red Wings story in our series, 'How Swede It Is' presented by JP Wiser's. Each story is a testament to the dedication and resolve between the players and the Red Wings to build upon and maintain a tradition of excellence between Swedish hockey and the Red Wings. We continue our series with defenseman Jonathan Ericsson

Since its inception in 1963, the NHL Entry Draft  has had as little as three rounds to as many as 25 rounds.

From 1995 - 2004, the Entry Draft had nine rounds. In that period, the Detroit Red Wings drafted “Mr. Irrelevant” - the last overall pick in the draft - three times.

One of those picks was Swedish defenseman Jonathan Ericsson, a converted center who played defense for less than a year when Detroit drafted him.

“My dad was the junior under-20 coach for the team I was on,” Ericsson said. “I was 17 at the time, I was about to turn 18.My dad asked me the night before we had a game, he said, ‘there’s a few D-men sick so would you be okay to play D tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’ll play D.’

“That game was against our rivals, probably the closest big city next to us that’s only 30 minutes away. It’s always a rivalry between us so there’s always kind of hate in the games. I played D and Hakan Andersson was at that game. He was actually there to watch a player on the other team, he told me after.”

Andersson, the Red Wings director of European scouting, was at the game to scout a player on the other team, but he liked what he saw in Ericsson’s game and contacted his father. He told the elder Ericsson he was going to come back and scout his son, but Andersson stressed he liked him as defenseman.

When Ericsson’s father told him about his conversation with Andersson, Ericsson was surprised. He didn’t even know what a scout was and suddenly out of nowhere, a scout was interested in him as a defenseman.

With Andersson coming back to watch Ericsson, his father gave him the choice of remaining at center or switching to defense.   

“I don’t think I even thought about it. I was like, ‘then I want to play D,’” Ericsson said. “I wasn’t a big scorer playing center, I was always taking the defensive side first, I was never scoring a lot of points.”

During the 2002 Draft, Andersson took a calculated risk of not using a high draft pick on Ericsson because he was banking on teams not being aware of the tall, lanky defenseman.

“It was a league that nobody scouted, a lower-level league,” Andersson said. “So I scouted him. I realized that I wanted to draft him based on four or five games. I said, ‘this is a player for us to draft.’  Then I went back another three games just to see if there was any other scout at the games. I would on purpose sit in the car outside in the parking lot, game starts at 7. I would go in at 7:03, sneak in and look up in the stands because he was playing in a junior league. There was maybe 50 people there.

“So when I came to the draft, I said to Jim (Nill), ‘I like him on the list in the third-round range, but I’m willing to take a gamble that nobody knows about him and we can take him with the last pick.’ He said, ‘Good, we’ll do that.’”

Welcome to Detroit, Mr. Irrelevant.

Once he was drafted by the Red Wings, Ericsson started getting noticed in his native Sweden. He finally had the opportunity to play for the Swedish Junior National Team, but playing for the Red Wings still seemed far-fetched.

“I’ve always been pretty realistic, so I never thought that I was going to make it.” Ericsson said. “Maybe I thought that I could have hockey on the side, play while I was working and maybe make some kind of living out of it. But I had prepared for college, I was going to be a building architect.”

Ericsson continued to play in Sweden, but his Swedish Elite League team moved him back to forward, a move that confused him and the Red Wings.

“Hakan was like, ‘What is going on? Do you want to play center, do you want to play D?’ I’m like, ‘I want to play D but right now, I’m just doing what they tell me to do,’” Ericsson said. “Hakan was a little bit worried, and I was, too. He’s like, ‘What do you feel about coming over here and going through Grand Rapids, going that way?’ I’m like, ‘I’ll do it. Right away.’ I didn’t even have to think about it.”

Finally, in 2006, at the age of 22, Ericsson became a full-time defenseman for the first time in his career with the Red Wings’ AHL-affiliate Grand Rapids Griffins.

Former Red Wings goalie Jimmy Howard was Ericsson’s teammate in Detroit and Grand Rapids. He jokingly described “Big E” as “tall, dark and beautiful.” But Howard also remembered him being ultra-competitive with a no-nonsense attitude.

“Big E was the type of player that played in front of you that he demanded a lot out of himself,” Howard said. “A lot of times he was very hard on himself. He took a lot of pride in his work. Besides his good looks and everything that he had going for him, he wasn’t afraid to stick up for his teammates either. He let that be known right away.

“He wasn’t afraid to drop the gloves for the guys or stick up for himself out there. Right from the get-go, you learned he was there, and he was there for the team.”

Danny DeKeyser considered Ericsson a mentor and a good friend who liked to have fun.

“I learned a lot from Johnny. Whether that was on the ice, off the ice, he did a lot of mentoring, him, and Kronner (Niklas Kronwall) were big influences on me,” the former Red Wings defenseman said. “He liked to keep it light so he would always be joking around, but he was a really competitive guy.

“Johnny was big and he was really strong. Especially down low in the D-zone, he made it hard for forwards to get to the net just because he’s so big and long. Long stick, he just made it hard on other teams’ players. He punished players in front of the net. He would take care of the team, he was a fighter. He took care of guys if need be. He was a good teammate.”

It was an improbable road to the NHL for Ericsson. Out of the 10 players who were drafted last between 1995 - 2004, only two ever played in the NHL.

The first player was Jay Henderson, who was the final pick in the 1997 NHL Entry Draft with the Boston Bruins from 1998-01. And Ericsson, who played in 680 regular-season games and 76 playoff games for the Red Wings, was the second.

“To be honest, I think it’s pretty cool to be picked last and then be able to play.” Ericsson said. “I’d rather take that than being picked in the (earlier) round. It sounds cooler.”