Confirmed with Link: Dakota goes South: Joshua Traded to Blues for Future Considerations

[Macallan18]

With the amount of late round picks in 2020 that we have I'm guessing our European scouts have spoken up and have tagged a bunch of guys we could target. Dubas seems really intent on making sure we have at least 4 7ths next year.

It's supposed to be one of the deepest drafts ever so always good to have extra ammo I suppose.

yup, looking for another Kaberle or Johnsson

 

[SprDaVE]

NCAA and Russia have been brutal, CHL has been meh but we've killed it in Sweden the last decade or so.

We really need to get better at taking the NCAA and Russian kids. I have some hope for Kara and Kizimov still.

It's been terrible. Everytime we pick from the USHL, I have to concede that it's likely a prospect that just never develops. It's overly pessimistic and all that but... I have yet to be proven wrong. Even the ones that look promising end up floundering one way or another. We obviously have a brand new scouting regime and what seems like a completely new way of scouting players... so I can only hope it improves from now on.

I think Woll is probably our best prospect drafted out of the NCAA and USHL in the past decade... and we don't even know how good he will be. Frattin and Stalberg (Swedish though) were okay but obviously not long-term.

 

[al secord]

We're going to rue the day we got rid of Dakota Johnson!

 

[justafan22]

USHL drafting has been dog poop the last decade

 

[justafan22]

Obviously they think they can do better with another free agent or something, and he wasn't worth an ELC. And it isn't at all hard to believe they could.

I think that poster missed the news that the Leafs weren't signing him anyways.

 

[gordonshumway]

It's been terrible. Everytime we pick from the USHL, I have to concede that it's likely a prospect that just never develops. It's overly pessimistic and all that but... I have yet to be proven wrong. Even the ones that look promising end up floundering one way or another. We obviously have a brand new scouting regime and what seems like a completely new way of scouting players... so I can only hope it improves from now on.

I think Woll is probably our best prospect drafted out of the NCAA and USHL in the past decade... and we don't even know how good he will be. Frattin and Stalberg (Swedish though) were okay but obviously not long-term.

I've said pretty much the same thing when Leafs made their draft picks last month but the Dubas fanboys kept arguing that "it's different this time" and "we can't judge this by past picks" etc etc.
Bottom line is Leafs have had a much *much* better luck using their late picks in Sweden/Finland than in the U.S. so why waste those picks? We have good euro scouts, give them something to do ffs.

 

[SeaOfBlue]

It's been terrible. Everytime we pick from the USHL, I have to concede that it's likely a prospect that just never develops. It's overly pessimistic and all that but... I have yet to be proven wrong. Even the ones that look promising end up floundering one way or another. We obviously have a brand new scouting regime and what seems like a completely new way of scouting players... so I can only hope it improves from now on.

I think Woll is probably our best prospect drafted out of the NCAA and USHL in the past decade... and we don't even know how good he will be. Frattin and Stalberg (Swedish though) were okay but obviously not long-term.

Part of the problem too is that we haven't really been picking NCAA/USHL guys since the times when we were bad at drafting period. Didn't matter where they came from (outside of Sweden I guess), it never worked out for us.

Since the scouting purge of April 12th, 2015 (aka the purging of the bad scouting times), we have drafted/signed (from what I can remember so correct me if I am wrong) a total of 8 USHL/NCAA players:

RW Jeremy Bracco (he was drafted in 2015 so maybe you don't want to count him since he technically could be considered part of that old scouting group)
G Joseph Woll
LD JD Greenway
LW Trevor Moore
G Kasimir Kaskisuo
RD Joseph Duszak
C Nicholas Abrusseze
LD Mike Koster

Let's not count Abrusseze, Duszak and Koster since they have yet to play much and that's a total of 5. Of those 5, we spent a 2nd and 2 3rd's, and out of it we received:

Bracco: a potential top 6 RW who more or less is our consensus 3rd best prospect and just put up a PPG+ as a 21/22 year old in the AHL
Woll: A potential starting goalie prospect who is consensus top 10 and looks very impressive thus far.
Greenway: A wildcard LD who, despite his struggles, still possesses a ton of talent and upside that can still be tapped.
Moore: A near lock as a young and cheap bottom 6 forward for the Leafs next year.
Kaskisuo: Nothing fancy and wildly inconsistent (partially due to injury) but someone who has had his moments and has been goalie depth for us.

I like our chances going forward, and we only have added to it since then. Noelle Needham received her job out of a blind interview for someone in that region. That's not easy to do, so I like our chances with that. Scott Bell is one of the more respected Minnesota area scouts in the NHL and was behind the Guentzel pick (which is really the only one he ever made, besides Clayton Phillips who didn't turn out that well so far).

It's going to take some time to get the bad taste out of our mouth from that previous regime, but since 2015, we've done a pretty good job accumulating talent in house and I think it only gets better.

 

[SeaOfBlue]

NCAA and Russia have been brutal, CHL has been meh but we've killed it in Sweden the last decade or so.

We really need to get better at taking the NCAA and Russian kids. I have some hope for Kara and Kizimov still.

My philosophy with drafting Russians is they need to satisfy at least one of the following criteria to even get put on my draft board:

1) Play in a pro league for a reasonable amount of time (i.e. more than one or two games) or if you are a goalie, dominating the junior league you are in as a first year eligible.
2) Dominate international competition.
3) Play outside of Russia and did well relative to those league standards (i.e. the CHL).

If they don't meet any of that criteria, even if they are amazing in Russian Jr. leagues, they are not worth a draft pick to me. So I would have likely not drafted Kizimov last year, but would have been fine drafting him this year (because he played in a pro league and did decently well there).

Then, if you are playing in Russia and are not meeting both #1 and #2, I'm not drafting you higher than the 4th round, and obviously depending on how well you meet them determines where you go. I will sometimes be lenient with #1 if you dominated international competition and are stuck in a stacked system like Yaroslavl or St. Petersburg, and therefore place the occasional prospect in the 2nd or 3rd round even though they technically only meet #2. Those are rare cases though. Obviously with #3 it purely depends how well you did relative to those league standards, and if you played internationally, then that can only help/hurt your case depending on how you did.

As you can imagine, I did not have too many Russians on my draft board in the end, and I did pretty well with the high end ones. Everyone in the top 3 rounds met my criteria for a top 3 round pick except Nikolayev, who was one of those rare cases who are stuck in a stacked system - in this case Yaroslavl - but did pretty well in the Russian Jr. League and dominated international competition. I thought he would either slip into the 3rd round or be one of the first guys off in the 4th... Ultimately it was the latter.

If you look at historical success for Russians, even the ones who end up going undrafted but turn out later (i.e. Panarin and Zaitsev), they all follow this criteria and I have yet to find one who didn't meet this criteria who did turn out. I have even found ones who were drafted early and turned out okay but only did as well as someone who was supposed to be drafted later because they only met one of the criteria.

Obviously there are still cases where they can meet both criteria and still suck, which is where deeper analytics and the eye test come in, but I always found it easy to weed out a lot of Russian bulk without having good guys fall through the cracks and that makes it easier for you to choose who to scout or not.​

 

[hfman]

Save your time...Enjoy a beer lol

some guys like to unwind with a beer

......and some guys like to unwind by writing 12 paragraphs

at more than 60K posts, I would have to guess that Cor is probably a 12-paragraph type of guy

...but to each their own