I think Snow's record in the late rounds is fairly good. How many 5th, 6th and 7th rounders actually end up getting few games in the NHL let alone end up bona fide NHLers? Very few. Only one or maybe two players from each round make it, and we've done well with those we picked.
However, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th round picks have been appallingly bad, especially when one considers the number of picks we've had. Hamonic, Cizikas, Pelech and Mayfield have all made it but the rest have not. We have wasted a tremendous amount of talent in those rounds think Koskinen, Trivino, Sundstøm, Ullstrøm, Clark, Pokka, Cammarata etc... Of course most players picked 2nd round onard never make it but our record must be among the worst.
For sure, that’s what I was getting at. For whatever reason, late round picks aren’t a problem. But we’ve repeatedly failed in the middle rounds. It would be one thing to get a decent player there, but we’re picking guys who don’t even make it to the pros. The most frustratng part is that we’ve barely missed out on great players in these rounds in some instances. Some gems include:
2007: 3rd round, 76th overll. We took Jason Gregoire. Alex Killorn was taken at 77.
2008: 2nd round, taking Corey Trivino 36th overall and Aaron Ness at 40th. Roman Josi was taken 38th and Justin Schultz at 43rd.
2009: 2nd round again. Took Mikko Koskinen 31st, two spots ahead of Ryan O’Reilly who was taken 33rd. The next goalie taken was Robin Lehner at 46. In the 3rd round, we took Anders Nilsson at 62, two spots ahead of Tyson Barrie who was taken 64th.
2010: We really love missing players by two spots, because it happened again this year. Round 7, pick 185, we took Cody Rosen. Frederik Anderson was taken at 187.
2011: Again, 2nd round. Took Scott Mayfield at 34th ahead of players like John Gibson (39th) and Brandon Saad (43rd) (jury is still out on Mayfield, but this is worth pointing out). At pick 50, we took Johan Sundstrom, and Nikita Kucherov was taken at 58. In the 3rd round, we took Andrey Peden at 63 and Florida took Vincent Trocheck with the next pick at 64.
2012: The infamous all defense draft in which we only have Adam Pelech to show for. We took Doyle Somerby at 125 in the 5th round. Connor Hellebuyck was taken at 130.
2013: Taylor Cammarata in the 3rd round, 76th overall. Jake Guentzel was take with the next pick at 77.
The next four drafts are still to be determined. I understand that drafts are often based on luck, but the amount of misses here are ridiculous, and these are only players we missed out on who have turned into impact players. There’s others taken around us who have become NHL’ers while our picks never made it.
Just to put things into prespective, here’s the games played for all the players we took vs. players we missed out on from above. These numbers come from the 11 players we took and the 11 we missed (not counting Lehner or Saad since they weren’t the next best picked), so everything is equal.
Players we took: 259 GP
Players we missed: 3,761 GP
I’ll let those numbers speak for themselves.