It's the single most absurd exercise in sports: Thousands of addled sports fans fill an arena somewhere while millions more tune in on television to watch a bunch of men in suits sitting around tables.

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Every now and then, all the men at one table (and it seems that every year there are more at each table) stand up and file to the stage, where the name of a young man is announced. The young man stands up. He kisses his mother, who is usually crying. He hugs his father. He marches to the stage, pulls on a baseball cap and jersey, shakes hands with the diminutive commissioner of the league in question.

Then you never hear of him again.

To listen to the hype on TSN, you would think that in terms of excitement, this

rivals this first moon landing. It says something about our culture that on a fine Friday evening in summer, millions of people can think of nothing better to do than to watch Pierre McGuire, Bob McKenzie and Gord Miller talk about the young man who has already had the most famous moment of his life.

Look, I love sports. If I didn't, I wouldn't do the job that I do. But the draft? The only time it's entertaining is when it's the NBA and David Stern has to shake hands with one giant after another.

Nor is it really meaningful. For at least 20 of the 30 teams who sat around those tables at the Bell Centre Friday and Saturday, the draft won't mean a thing. It won't make them significantly better or significantly worse. If they were lucky, they picked up a little fresh meat they can throw on the ice for less money than a veteran third-liner or fifth defenceman would earn.

If they're very lucky, they get a Sidney Crosby, an Alexander Ovechkin, an Evgeni Malkin.

If they're very unlucky, they look back at a whole chapter of their history. As my great and good friend Mike Boone has pointed out in his blog, the Canadiens have had far more first-round disasters than success stories over the past 25 years.

Read 'em and weep, beginning in 1985: José Charbonneau, Mark Pederson, Eric Charron, Lindsay Vallis, Brent Bilodeau, David Wilkie, Brad Brown, Terry Ryan, Matt Higgins and éric Chouinard, taken by Réjean Houle, most memorably, instead of teammate Simon Gagné.

(Houle atoned for that one by picking Mike Ribeiro, François Beauchemin, Gordie Dwyer, Andrei Markov and Michael Ryder later in that 1998 draft, the Canadiens best since 1987, when Serge Savard nabbed Andrew Cassels, John LeClair, éric Desjardins and Mathieu Schneider.)

The jury is still very much out on several more recent first-rounders, including Ryan McDonagh, David Fischer, Kyle Chipchura and even Carey Price. In recent years, the Canadiens did best in the first round of the draft when André Savard was minding the store or advising Bob Gainey. In successive seasons, they plucked Mike Komisarek, Christopher Higgins and Andrei Kostitsyn.

Herein is the cautionary note for this year's much-ballyhooed first-round pick, local boy Louis LeBlanc. There are enough failures, even among first-rounders, to make it important for a young man with LeBlanc's ability to go his own way.