League average per draft is two NHL players. If Lindstrom shows up which seems pretty likely thus far at worst we hit league average on what you can expect in this draft and in a weak draft to boot.
Is that how we want to evaluate our drafts though? I understand that for the longest time fans, media, and I'd assume front offices evaluated their drafts by the number of players they could get from one draft but is that the best way to look at it? I think we should expect more out of our drafts than just aiming for "average" players, even in a weak draft. You can always find talent, the talent may not develop as you hope but it is always out there. The 97 draft, Datsyuk draft, and 98 draft, Zetterberg draft, were successful even though we had just 1 & 2 players come out of those drafts respectively. Compare it to the 05 draft, 10 draft, or even the 2002 draft, and the '98/99 drafts are still better even though we didn't produce a large number of NHLers.
In this day and age I think we should be evaluating the drafts based on the impact those players provide or some combination of NHLer vs contribution.
And people have to understand that there's big differencies in draft strength.
Like at 2011 we did hoard almost all Trophy Winning defencemen, but that class was just overall weak. It hasn't produced many NHL defencemen for any team. Dougie Hamilton is the best D from 2011 and he is nothing special. Just good and never wins a Norris.
You can't beat the class level of strentgh, if it's weak. They play in a weak competition and even in weak compeition somebody looks good. But the real truth comes up against NHL competition vs other classes. Other classes will outplay them.
And Wings scouting staff knew this problem with 2017 draft class very well. That's why they did that character thing, went after different kind of guys, because there was less skill available. This was made on purpose, because building and developing a group of prospects is more complicated than just getting skill players.
No, that is not true at all, like not even close. This narrative that you present of being unable to find talent in weak draft classes is ridiculous. Every draft has talented players selected in the later rounds, whether it is a weak, average, or a strong class. The 1998 draft was considered a weak class yet we drafted Datsuyk, I wonder what would have happened if we took the 2017 draft approach in that year? What about 1999 a draft which was considered
"The deepest seen in years"? It's now considered to be one of the weakest of any draft and has very little to show for all the hype.
Changing your draft strategy based on the perception of the players available is ridiculous and it's how you end up wasting valuable assets, eg: picks. If you want to find the Datsyuk's and Zetterberg's in each draft class you need to swing for the fences, go for the high upside picks, because eventually you'll have one that develops and becomes a star level player. You may only produce 1, maybe 2 NHLers every few years but they will provide you with more than enough value to make up for being the lone player from those drafts.
Lastly, what good is a non skilled prospect if you're not even going to sign them? We have at least 4 guys from this draft that we won't sign, what value are they going to provide the organization? That they came to 2 or 3 development camps, had a good week, and then didn't even play well enough to earn an ELC? You can argue that any pick after the 2nd is valueless, or close to it, because the success rate of getting an NHL player is so small, but when you conduct a draft in the way the Wings did in 2017 you're not even giving yourself a chance to get a useful NHL player.
Also, here are a list of players that were found after the 3rd round that have plenty of skill: Stelio Mattheos, 73rd; Evan Barratt, 90th; Emil Bemstrom, 117th; Drake Batherson, 121st; Igor Shvyryov, 125th; Lucas Elvens, 127th; Tyler Steenbergen, 128th; Sebastian Aho (D), 139th. There are others but those are just names that I recognized that fit the bill of being skilled players with good upside. Not all of them will make it to the NHL but that doesn't mean the picks weren't successful; drafting NHLers consistently is hard and drafting good NHLers is even harder. All of these players have non 0 chances to be contributing members of an NHL team, which is more than can be said for our "Character players".
