I’m wondering how much Clarke being an RD will effect his value. This aren’t generic teams drafting so I of course.
Anaheim finding Edvinsson worth taking that high to get a partner for Drydale is interesting. He would make up for Drysdale sin of being under 6’0”. (You pointed out that Anaheim and Ottawa historically draft for size a while back and I somehow never noticed that even though they really did.)
Lol on Calgary processing their trama over Markstrom’s struggles and all three centers being gone by drafting a goalie. They have Wolf though. I guess they have a lot of LHD prospects? They could use a high end scorer though.
Ottawa taking Beniers is a little surprising but I don’t even sort of know where conventional wisdom is here with his ranking. Clarke would make a ton of sense for them unfortunately.
Anaheim had one of the best drafts in the league last year (2020 1st Round -- Drysdale and Perreault), and in 2019 lucked out at Trevor Zegras at #9 when Edmonton made the baffling pick of Philip Broberg at #8. So, maybe they've turned the corner draft-wise. But this is a front office which has had great stability in recent years. They tend to ice one of the biggest teams, actual-size wise, in the entire NHL and rarely draft smaller players. They have also drafted an inordinate percentage of their players out of either North America or Sweden, which could represent either an organizational bias or simply a disparity in how much influence certain scouts possess when draft decisions are being made. Either way, this factors in to my mind-set when I am working on mock draft scenarios and Anaheim is set to pick. Last year people were mocking them players like Marco Rossi and Lucas Raymond at #5 overall, and I was like
no, not Anaheim. Drysdale is the smallest player they have drafted in the first two rounds since Kyle Palmieri. In the last 5 drafts, the Ducks have drafted just one skater who hails from a place other than North America or Sweden, using a 5th round pick last year on LW Artyom Galimov.
This leads me to believe that the Ducks will overvalue certain highly ranked players over others who do not fit their M.O. Simon Edvinsson has everything the Anaheim scouts seem to fawn over -- he's big, fast and Swedish. The only element he lacks is physicality. Though certain outlying draft analysts have him in a far lower tier than LD like Power or Hughes (I have him at #14, while Steve Kournianos has Edvinsson at #23), other draft analysts have ranked him as high as #3. But look at the LD they have drafted higher than expected in the past decade -- Jacob Larsson (6'2, Swedish), Marcus Pettersson (6'3, Swedish), Hampus Lindholm (6'3, Swedish). The problem is that, of these picks, only Lindholm has truly become an impact defender for them, while Larsson and Pettersson are serviceable players, they don't move the needle. So, now the Ducks find themselves in a place where they are extremely organizationally thin at LD -- they have a pair of pretty promising prospects for the middle-pair (Jackson LaCombe) and bottom-pair (Henry Thrun), but nothing which is potentially top-pairing caliber. Personally, I feel Edvinsson projects to more of a very, very good middle-pairing NHLer, but due to Anaheim's scouting proclivities, I believe they are the type of team who would value his particular skill set more than myself or Steve Kournianos.
