InjuredChoker
Registered User
Q: “In your evaluations of the talent in this draft do you think it’s more beneficial for this franchise to have the quantity of those three first round picks or would it be more beneficial to get the quality and move up?â€
JK: “It’s not easy to move up, I can tell you that. I’ve talked with a couple of you and just from my past experience with the draft was here in 2007 we had three first round picks with St. Louis [Blues]. We tried every possible scenario to try to move up from nine to one, from nine to two, from nine to three, and so forth. We couldn’t even move from nine to seven and seven was Columbus’ pick at the time. We tried a lot of different things to try to move up. When other teams know that there are good players and they do their homework, it is not easy to move up.â€
JK: “One thing I learned from my drafts--I was fortunate enough to have general managers that had experience in the scouting field and they understood how the draft worked obviously--I think that as a general manager I was fortunate that those guys always provided the best possible opportunity for the scouting staff with the moves they made so that’s the philosophy I’ll have going into this weekend where we have three first round picks and we’re going to do everything we can to provide our scouting staff the best possible opportunity, whether it’s keeping those picks, moving up, or possibly moving back and getting some more picks and opportunities to pick players. The probabilities are not that high but if you have ten picks and the probability at the end of the day doesn’t really matter if the quantity of the players you get that might contribute in the NHL. So if you have 15 darts to throw and you count the thirty percent or the fifty percent out of that or whatever your percentage might be, it’s a lot more quantity than taking the same thirty percent out of eight picks or six picks.â€
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