I think it's still important to keep perspective on things with the draft. This pick, wherever it ends up being...it's not going to be some kind of "cure all" for our rebuild. It's not going to be that one final piece to cap things off. It's just one of what needs to be many many pieces that we still don't have.
Even if we do manage to nab ourselves a stud defensive prospect for example...in all likelihood, it's going to be at least 3-5 years before we start to see real NHL dividends from the pick. There are always a few defencemen, mostly from the very top of the draft who manage to make the jump a bit sooner...but defence is a bit like goaltending, in that there's typically a lot of time investment before the picks start to really pay off. You need to draft defencemen well before you need defencemen (unfortuantely we're already in a big hole with that, which is where desperation mistakes tend to happen). Even good quality blue-chip defence prospects often take 3-5 years before they manage to gain a real NHL foothold.
All the more reason to try to get some more irons in the fire in terms of defence prospects developing sooner, rather than later. But it's not going to be something that immediately fixes our NHL team's defensive depth issues. There's a great likelihood that a defenceman picked now, isn't going to pay any NHL dividends until the Sedins are done and gone.
That's the eventuality that you're really drafting on "need" for. In which case, we need an awful lot of things still, not just defencemen. Can't keep ignoring defence and/or not getting much out of the position in the pipeline as has happened for a lot of years now, but at the same time...you really don't want to start passing up forwards where we still look to have a lot of "rebuilding" to do as well. Realistically...it looks as though we potentially still have a "need" of various degrees for the future at every single position.
