‘Vanek hadn’t been drafted yet and there was Buffalo sitting with the fifth overall pick in June. Columbus had the fourth pick and used it to take Nikolai Zherdev. Vanek thought for sure that’s where he was going, “Buffalo was definitely one of the teams I met, but I didn’t think I was going to end up there because Columbus at four and even the morning of the draft it was that I was going to Columbus because the first three picks were pretty much set (Marc-Andre Fleury, Eric Staal and Nathan Horton) so Buffalo wasn’t even on my mind, but that didn’t happen and I was more than happy and it worked out great.”’