Man even if they do pull off a decent deadline we're just in such a deep pit in terms of depth and talent on this team, with no real hope of being a solid team for several seasons. Had Benning not gone for this age gap BS and acquired and stockpiled picks and prospects instead of bad waiver fodder NHL players we'd be so much further along in our rebuild.
Not to mention absolute flubs in the first round and lack of 2nd round picks. We could be sitting here with a forward core built around Horvat Ehlers Tkachuck, and possibly Pastranak (if you feel pretty generous with hindsight).
We have one really good and exciting young player in Horvat. The rest of the drafted guys we just don't have enough info at the pro level to get excited, let alone them even being signed. But say Boeser and Gaudette do pan out nicely, we're still really poorly constructed and have horrible issues with organizational depth, a poor development system, poor pro scouting, poor coaching, a couple good scouts mixed in with a lot of trash scouts, ownership that gets too hands on, a puppet of a president and a bottom-3 general manager who is in way over his head.
I have to agree with a lot of this.
We're going to need several years of stockpiling picks (including high ones) and really good drafting to build depth in our prospect pool thanks to JB's horrible mismanagement by trading picks and prospects for band-aids that didn't work.
Hopefully we can land some good NCAA free agents (like Stetcher) for our forward group.There's defnintely a ton of opportunity here for any of them.
Our defense prospect pool does have some good depth but no clear cut top pairing/PPQB type.Maybe someone we have will emerge as one of those guys but probably not both.Stetcher could be the PPQB,or Forsling could have been but he got traded for crap.Juolevi I see as more of a complementary top pairing guy but he is still developing so he's a bit of a wildcard.Brisbois looks to have a similar ceiling as well.
Like you said,we have exactly one bona fide exciting young player who's an established top sixer.Baertschi is kind of a Jan Bulis type,top six on a bad team but not a fit on a strong team as he can't play down the lineup.
Boeser and Gaudette are projecting as top sixer's but neither are signed.Lockwood,so far,seems like a 2/3 tweener and isn't signed either.
After that,our forward group falls off a cliff.Virtanen needs to turn it around big time or he's another Jack Skille.I'd probably rate Jordan Subban as our next best offensive forward after that and he's playing defense in the AHL.
Mckenzie is worth a look as a potential bottom sixer but the rest aren't worth an NHL contract.
The lost opportunities here will keep us in the NHL basement for the next several years.
I think a bunch of us wanted Barbashev over McCann (can't recall many advocating for Pastranak but props to those that did) so it will be interesting to see how he pans out as an NHLer.His Jr and AHL numbers post draft look promising,though.
We need to build some depth in goal as well just in case Demko doesn't pan out.One more good G prospect like him in the pipleline would solidify things but because of our awful forward depth and lack of picks,we can't afford to address this now which we should.
