It's funny to play "I told ya so", but I can't stop thinking about that 2017 draft where I took some heat for saying the Rangers pick of Lias Andersson at #7 overall was going to go down as their biggest draft-day blunder since Hugh Jessiman.
It's not just that I did not have Andersson ranked as a first-round pick -- he lacked both scoring skills and compete level, a brutal combination for a kid taken in the top 10. But it was also that the Rangers needed a center to build around and the Rangers passed on some very good ones -- Gabe Vilardi and Nick Suzuki and (I know he busted too but he would have been a better pick) Casey Mittlestadt to take a kid who did not display the skills of anything beyond a bottom six LW.
The Rangers recovered a bit later in the round to take Filip Chytil, whom I really like. Still, though Chytil is still listed as a center, I see his future more on the wing, and most of my Rangers fan friends (we all have a lot of those, ha) would tend to agree.
The Rangers repeated this mistake two years later in the second round when they took Karl Henriksson with John Farinacci still on the board. Farinacci projected as an excellent, two-way second line center and they went with Henriksson -- bigger, but slower, less skilled, less competitive and a lower hockey IQ. It made little sense, considering Farinacci is also local -- a New Jersey product, but I do think that the Rangers are occasionally guilty of trying to make all their regional scouts happy rather than taking the best available player, especially at forward.
