For me, “later in the draft” starts with 4th rounders, which encompasses the Husso pick.
The goal of the draft is to get guys to be top players and not have to pay anything for them, asset-wise. 1st rounders are supposed to be top players, you don’t really get credit for that imo. It’s an expectation. The odds are lower for the 2nd and 3rd round, but the expectation should still be that you’re getting NHL players there. Further down the draft, it’s a lot harder to do, and finding talent that nobody else saw gets you cred.
Between 2011-2013, we had 6 2nd rounders, and only one is contributing in a top role today: Edmundson. I like Jaskin and think he’s better than people give him credit for in his role, but he was not - as I predicted - the heir apparent to Berglund. To get Carrier and Vannelli, we gave up Ben Bishop, a 3rd round pick, and two 4th rounders. That’s a ton of value going out for essentially no return. Yes I realize he was included in the Miller trade, no I don’t think that disproves the point I’m making. The fact that we only got *one* other NHL player out of those 3 years (Parayko) has made it hard to absorb those misses.
2014 was obviously a huge turnaround, and I like the odds of Fabbri, Barbashev, Walman, Husso, and Blais all contributing in some way in the future. For that, you can forgive misses on Poganski, Descheneau, Yakimowicz and Tschantz. With potentially 5 players coming out of that draft, the misses don’t matter so much.
2015 we went back to probably only getting one, maaaybe 2 NHL players on this team, depending on how Musil continues to develop. Mikkola is an unknown quantity until he comes over full time, he might as well be Lehtera until he does. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that Opilka has been injured as much as he has.
The next year, we got Thompson, Kyrou, Fitzpatrick, Kaspick, and Stevens. At worst, we’ll see two of them, but potentially all 5 can be valuable in their own right.
Then last year, we got Thomas and Kostin. The other 4 are all long-shots, but they were also all late picks so the “expectation” is lower there. Still, the reason you make a gamble of moving early picks is because you hope you make a big splash in the later rounds. But then we went out and took... Bourque? I don’t get it.
All I’m saying here guys is that our drafting hasn’t filled in our needs as fast as we’re developing needs. In the first 3 years of Barmy’s tenure, weve averaged 1 player per draft (depending on what happens with Schmaltz, up to 1.3). Since then, we have the *potential* to jump up to 3.25 per year, in the absolute best case scenario, but it’ll likely be lower than that. And it’ll take time for these guys to develop, just as a product of their age. To be successful at drafting, my personal belief is you need to add at least two every year to remain competitive and keep everything stocked. Because we didn’t do that in the early 2010s after Schwartz/Tarasenko, were paying for it now by not having those extra bodies contributing. By going out and getting Sanford (2013), Soshkinov (2015) and Foley (2015), it looks to me like we’re conscious of that, and trying to fill in those holes now. We didn’t draft them, so we had to go trade for the assets we would have had if we did.
But remember what I said at the very beginning of this post: the goal is to get guys for free. By not doing that, we had to move assets to get what we need.
Am I encouraged by where we’re going? Yes, more or less, but just getting the first rounders right doesn’t get you cookies, you gotta do more than that. *Especially* if you don’t have a first rounder. Two a year, minimum, that’s what we should be aiming for. It looks like we’re on the right track, but we’ll see if/when they get here.
