Roof Daddy
Registered User
- Apr 1, 2008
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That's a fair point, but remember there was a big "fail for Nail" campaign that year. That's maybe an unfair comparison because of the difference in (social) media compared to Daigle's era, but even though Yak was the lesser regarded prospect he probably had more actual hype coming into the league.
Even with the difference in media I would still say Daigle was far more hyped. Consider the fact that he was the reason we have a draft lottery now. Teams were losing on purpose in pretty obvious ways to try and land 1st overall (not to the degree they did in 84 for Lemieux, but not far off). 2 years later, we have a draft lottery. Also consider the quality of that draft and who teams had to pass on to take Daigle 1st (and he was the slam dunk 1st overall) - Pronger (unanimous #2 selection), Kariya (went 4, destroyed college hockey as a draft eligible). Just a little better than Yak vs a steady Eddie vanilla Dman with injury concerns vs a guy who was injured all year vs a big D who needs to improve skating and ferocity vs a dynamic D who also missed the whole year. I still don't know how Forsberg dropped considering he was in the conversation for top 5 pre draft, but got passed by that pile of mediocrity (save for Reilly and maybe Galchenyuk).
The hype for Daigle was real. For Nail, there was certainly hype, but not to the point of franchise changing player.