Former Waterloo Black Hawks forward Jack Drury traded to Predators

Jack Drury was traded to the Nashville Predators on June 24 in a four-player deal with the Colorado Avalanche, a move that sent the former Waterloo Black Hawks captain into another NHL organization just two days before the 2026 draft opens at KeyBank Center in Buffalo. Nashville received Drury, Chase Bradley and Colorado’s 2029 third-round pick, while Colorado acquired Fedor Svechkov and Zachary L’Heureux.

The trade carried contract and roster implications beyond the names involved. Colorado had treated Drury as a pending restricted free agent with arbitration rights, and he could become an unrestricted free agent in 2027. It was also the second trade in about eight days between the clubs after the Ross Colton deal, a quick stretch of business that has already tied Nashville and Colorado together ahead of draft week.

For Waterloo, the move landed on familiar ground. Drury played exactly 100 regular-season games for the Black Hawks across the 2016-17 and 2017-18 USHL seasons, starting with 12 points as a rookie before breaking out for 24 goals and 41 assists for 65 points in 56 games the next year. That 2017-18 season brought All-USHL Second Team honors, the team captaincy and a spot in the USHL/NHL Top Prospects Game, and it ended with Waterloo winning the Anderson Cup.

Drury’s path kept moving through Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spent two seasons at Harvard from 2018 to 2020. Harvard’s roster page listed him with 24 points as a freshman and a plus-10 rating, and it also showed how much value he brought in the faceoff circle, where he ranked 19th nationally at 58.2 percent. NHL records say Drury signed his first contract with Carolina in 2021 and made his NHL debut on Dec. 16, 2021.

That background explains why the trade matters in junior hockey circles as much as it does in NHL front offices. Colorado general manager Chris MacFarland described Drury as a hard-working, reliable, full-sheet center who can take tough assignments and handle faceoffs, a scouting profile that fits the two-way game he showed in Waterloo and later at Harvard. Nashville now adds a center with NHL experience and a junior résumé built on production, responsibility and results, and Waterloo gets another alumni marker in a deal that reached all the way into the heart of draft week.