Libor Polášek

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Position	Centre
Shot	Left
Height Weight	6 ft 04 in (1.93 m) 226 lb (103 kg/16 st 2 lb)
Pro clubs	Vsetin HC Dubnica Spartak HC (Slovak) Kosice HC (Slovak) Zvolen HK Plzen HC Vitkovice HC Opava HC HC Slavia Praha
Nationality	Czech Republic
Born	April 22, 1974 (1974-04-22) (age 34), Novy Jicin, Czechoslovakia
NHL Draft	21st overall, 1992 Vancouver Canucks
Pro career	1992 – 2006

Libor Polasek is regarded by most Vancouver Canucks fans, and hockey people in general, as one of the worst NHL first-round draft picks the team ever made. Born April 22, 1974, he was selected 21st overall by GM Pat Quinn in the 1992 NHL Entry Draft. The Canucks could have picked Valeri Bure, (the small-but-skilled younger brother of breakout star Pavel Bure), who was eventually selected 33rd by the Montreal Canadiens. The Canucks hoped that the tall (6’4”) Czech center would develop into a Mark Messier-like player. Instead, Polasek had difficulty making an impact even at the minor-league level. , He scored a total of just 18 goals over two seasons (1992–1994) playing with the Hamilton Canucks farm team in the AHL. In the AHL playoffs in 1993–94, he scored no goals in three games during Hamilton’s four-games first-round loss to Cornwall.

After a goal-less seven-game stint in the ECHL in 1994–95, he returned to the AHL with the new Canuck affiliate Syracuse Crunch and scored just two goals in 45 games. In 1995–96, he played 19 games in the Czech league then returned to the Crunch for eight more goal-less games. He returned to Europe and in almost a decade of playing for Czech and Slovak teams he scored just 41 goals from 1996–97 to 2005–06.

According to CNNSI.com’s 2001 profile of Canuck draft busts (Say it ain’t so: Transactions that broke our hearts): “Polasek fared worse than the previous three (first-round busts Dan Woodley, Jason Herter and Alek Stojanov) combined -- he never played in an NHL game. In fact, one is hard-pressed to even find statistics on Polasek in many hockey annals.”

The Vancouver Sun’s Iain MacIntyre also wrote in 2001 that if “nuclear winter” set in due to the Canuck draft record in the 80s, then the team “detonated the H-bomb on themselves in 1992 in the form of Libor Polasek, who soon vanished. Not so the Canucks' reputation for picking more duds than CBS programmers.”