The thing is that we know he doesn't believe that. Just check out this post from 2017 and compare it to now. Does this sound like a guy who doesn't believe in prospect pools?
Prospect Info: Devils Prospect Rankings By Position
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The thing is that we know he doesn't believe that. Just check out this post from 2017 and compare it to now. Does this sound like a guy who doesn't believe in prospect pools?
The other thing is that everybody has a big draft whiff. Tampa salvaged theirs - they moved Drouin for Sergachev - but in 2012 they drafted Slater Koekkoek 10th overall. The Blues are one team that really doesn't have a huge whiff but they haven't drafted a ton in the 1st round - that said, their 2014 1st round pick contributed almost nothing to their Cup win in 2019. The Capitals threw away Filip Forsberg and drafted Karl Alzner 5th overall. Pittsburgh took Derrick Pouliot 7th overall in 2012. The Kings took Thomas Hickey 4th overall in 2007. The Blackhawks took Kyle Beach 11th overall in 2008. You can miss sometimes, almost everybody does (although Washington and St. Louis have done a really good job lately). It's about hitting in the later rounds to make up for those misses.
JimEIV
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I do believe in prospect pools...Very much so. Why would I be here if I didn't...
I have a problem and have since I started coming here with characterizations of certain prospect pools being good and others not with no basis in reality ...It stemmed from the Hockey's Future ranking that used to be prevalant. I really went off on this tangent with this concept around 2001/02. This Idea of Slava Chistov has a higher upside than say a Paul Martin therefore the pool that has Chistov is better....Nonsense!
Back then I said I don't think Chistov is an NHL player but I think Paul Martin is a lock...So doesn't that make the Martin pool better if true? No one agreed with this concept...Not a single person. Cieling determined the pool quality according to everyone. I didn't then, and don't now agree with this concept. Not one bit.
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- Dec 20, 2018
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Honestly, he we could have tanked sooner if Lou never traded for Schneider. The 2014 draft didn’t really matter since we were locked in with the 30th pick, so the Czech renaissance was a harmless blast. In the 2014-15 season, Cory’s goalie point share was 14.5, 2nd best in the NHL, in part because he played 68 games as DeBoer desperately tried to keep his job and he was incredible, an absolute machine.
His win share was 2015-16 was 11.1, tied for 9th. If we could have managed to have been worse than Carolina we would have drafted Aho at 35, Ray only traded down for Blackwood and a extra pick after the Canes snagged the guy he was targeting. We may have taken Zacha 5th though and it would have been tough to have been worse than Toronto, they we exceptional at tanking, but a bad starting goalie may have done it.
Nobody gives a shit about Stan Chistov and Paul Martin anymore. If you can't assess the Devils' prospect pool on its merits right now and see that it is one of the best, not based on upside, but based on skates-on-the-ground actual f***ing results that players are putting up - that Holtz has had an electric start for Djugardens, that Mercer is an excellent prospect, and Smith, and so on - then you are blind to what is going on, period.
The most common mistake people can make in assessing prospects is going off draft position. It matters - only because we have very limited knowledge about these players - but not a whole lot, and not for very long.
JimEIV
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I just have seen this dance too many times and you sort of hinted at what I am talking about by bringing up the shiny new toys...the Holtz and Mercer have no warts right now in the eyes of everyone...Go back and read the "skates-on-the-ground actual f***ing results that players are putting up" analysis from the Professional writers on Mcleod in 2016 and 2017...If you were to question any of it early on it turned into pissing match of upset fans.
It's the way it always goes the next prospect is the greatest prospect.....until they are not.
Holtz is currently a first-line player in a top men's league. If you can't tell the difference between this and McLeod doing what he did in the year after being picked, you're the one who is being naive.
- Dec 20, 2018
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The 2016 draft is looking weak with only 33.2% of the draft class having made the NHL, so at least 5 of our picks have made an appearance. I wish we picked a defensemen, the team wasn’t that into McLeod, they dropped down and I’m pretty convinced that “fast attacking” mania may have contributed (along with hating defensemen).
In vast contrast the 2011 draft is fantastic, 59.2% of the players played an NHL game. No other draft touches that depth, the next best is 2009 at 55.2% and that draft is 4% higher then the third best since 1995 (2012). If 2002 later picks were basically useless, then later 2011 picks are the Platonic ideal.
Coleman went 75th in a 3rd round that also has Trocheck, Cousins and Lowry, plus number of depth players and tweeners with somehow an astonishing 7 draftees not playing a game in the NHL. That’s doesn’t happen in 2nd round of drafts, forget about the 3rd.
Pageau is at the beginning of the 4th. Boucher went at 99 then Gaudreau starts a string of late gems of with a legendary bang: Rieder, Shaw, Manson, DeMalo, Dzingel and Palat.
Boucher is a solid 4th round pick and gripping about not getting later round gems never makes sense to me. However, it’s frustrating to remember we traded the 38th pick to Nashville for the failed Arnott reunion because, while the Preds blew it, that 2nd round gets filthy, only three guys didn’t make the NHL and a lot of good things could have happened with that pick, Kucherov only being the most obvious.
Coleman ended up being a great pick and just because he’s the product of a monster draft doesn’t change that. But by comparing 2002, which is an abysmal draft preceded by three crappy ones, with 2011, a fantastic draft surround by several good and another great one, you can see that you can’t just assume having a bunch of extra later picks in a particular draft can get a team NHL players through smart scouting because sometimes there just isn’t much there.
I will add that I’m discussing these drafts in terms of overall depth and when they are ranked they are often judged by their 1st round, top 10 or top 3 etc I’m discussing this in terms of what happens when a team has a lot of later picks for obvious reasons.
My best defense of the Devils 2002 draft is that Anaheim, who are John Wick level drafting assassins, couldn’t get one NHL game out their 6 picks after the 2nd round. And if you point out that happened in 1996 and 1997, those drafts are arguably even bigger dogshit than 2002.
What happens if you turn John Wick loose in the 2011 draft? One of my favorite low key drafts by a non-Devils team. I just loooove Duck drafting. (Whaaat? I like to look at drafts, don’t judge...)
| 1 | 30 | Rickard Rakell |
| 2 | 39 | John Gibson |
| 2 | 53 | William Karlsson |
| 3 | 65 | Joseph Cramarossa |
| 3 | 83 | Andy Welinski |
| 5 | 143 | Max Friberg |
| 6 | 160 | Josh Manson |
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Emperoreddy
Show Me What You Got!
Thing about 2016 is we did make one of the best picks in that draft and most likely goes top 30 in any redraft
We just took that player with a 6th rounder instead of a 1st rounder.
The goal of a draft is to get NHL talent out of it. Whether its through players you drafted or assets you aquire with those prospects in trades. Every draft has misses and it doesn't really matter what picks hit as long as they hit. Its just the odds of hitting are greater earlier on.
If we took Bratt in McLeod's spot and he ended up how he did, the 2016 draft wouldn't even be a topic of conversation right now.
We just took that player with a 6th rounder instead of a 1st rounder.
The goal of a draft is to get NHL talent out of it. Whether its through players you drafted or assets you aquire with those prospects in trades. Every draft has misses and it doesn't really matter what picks hit as long as they hit. Its just the odds of hitting are greater earlier on.
If we took Bratt in McLeod's spot and he ended up how he did, the 2016 draft wouldn't even be a topic of conversation right now.
Azathoth
Registered User
Maybe I'm miss-remembering the scouting on McLeod, but I thought the skinny on him was he was the best skater in the draft with a sub-par shot and the question was always going to be, will he put up points? I don't think anyone really questioned that. I think the hope was that he could eventually be the 2C to Zacha's 1C, which obviously isn't going to come true for either.
JimEIV
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You're missing the point.
I wasn't even commenting on Holtz. In fact, I haven't commented on a single player from this draft. Not once, other than to say I wanted a Dman with our first pick I have said almost nothing regarding the 2020 drafted players.
The point was, the newest, the guys with smallest resume's and track records are always the greatest thing...So if you had Mcleod in your top 2, 4 years ago and barely on your list today.....It's not the prospect got significantly better, not 18 to 20 players better, it was you were just terribly wrong 4 years ago. And that is the case more often than not.
Edit: It reminds me of at work when a project manager revises the time line multiple times then claims it was on-time.
If you revise your project deadline 4 times and hit it on 5th go-round....Please don't tell me your project was on time when you hit the 5th date...but in this case we never even hit the date, we just keep making revisions to it.
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They only dropped one spot. I really don't know how they managed to do that, but they did. I guess if they valued Brown and McLeod equally, they could do this. I don't think it was fast attacking mania per se - I think it's well-known that it is harder to project defenseman instead of forwards. Supposedly the Devils were going to take Bratt in the 5th round but Shero wanted a D so they took Rykov.
It's worth noting, I think, that the 2016 draft is going to suffer by this metric of games played because I think the end of last season is when a decent number of 2016 draftees might've gotten some garbage time. But overall it is not looking like a very hot draft and for the Devils to get 2 NHL players out of it is halfway decent, in addition to the fact that all their picks got ELCs.
Right. 2014 is a bad draft, and was thought to be so at the time. Still, the Devils did very bad even considering that.
Devils could use one or two of these drafts.
MartyOwns
thank you shero
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that’s usually what happens when your drafting gets better and better instead of worse and worse.
JimEIV
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What usually happens it unfounded claims of great, good or better get made and have to be revised or replaced with a fresh set great, good or better when reality sets in.
No, this is also incorrect, and wildly so - it's ludicrous to evaluate things this way. Most NHL draft picks have to improve before they can make the NHL and so we track that improvement by how they do in lower leagues. McLeod put up 100 points in 77 junior games in 2016-17 and made the Canadian WJC team. By all rights, at the end of 2017, he was a top 100 NHL prospect at that juncture. He got injured in 2017-18 and had 54 points in 44 games and didn't have an increased role on Team Canada. His peers are now doing better than he was. So then you jump to the next year and he does okay in the AHL but not great. Again, he should be downgraded relative to his peers.
It's not that Michael McLeod was never a prospect and there's no reality in which he is a good NHL player. It's that he got hurt and whatever in his game was expected to develop more simply hasn't developed.
JimEIV
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And how is any of that different from anyone else? Say Quenneville? It wasn't a suck pick..."They just stopped developing"? ok. There are no bad picks then...Just poor development
And how is any of that different from anyone else? Say Quenneville? It wasn't a suck pick..."They just stopped developing"? ok. There are no bad picks then...Just poor development
It's not different from Quenneville, which if you had been paying attention, you would see that is my point. I don't think John Quenneville is a bad pick, he's a fine player but he just didn't make the NHL full-time. He just missed. McLeod is also likely to be a just-miss. They have most of the skills of an NHL player but just don't do enough well at that level to play full time.
There are bad picks, but there are rarely outrageously bad picks, at least not in the 1st round. Most of the horrible picks were big immobile D and teams have mostly stopped selecting those guys in the 1st. Where you get the bad picks are later on in the draft when teams take wild swings on players who have a high chance of not even being decent pros. That's where the bad picks happen, and the Devils had far too many of these.
JimEIV
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I think that is letting them off too easy and sugar-coating the reality of the situation. McLeod was a bad pick, a really bad pick...Think of this for second...Janne Kuokkanen was taken AFTER Mcleod AND Bastian and he is head and shoulders better than both of them...I mean it isn't even remotely close what Kuokkanen has achieved at the AHL level compared to those two. And Kuokkanen isn't even a lock to be a NHL player... Kuokkanen was #43 in that draft. We used a #11 to get Mcleod
MartyOwns
thank you shero
- Apr 1, 2007
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if your point is that a teams’ fans will typically be overly optimistic about their prospects, then fine. that doesn’t change the fact that our prospect pool today is a million times better than it was 10 years ago, even after factoring in that optimism.
AfroThunder396
[citation needed]
Nah, McLeod sucks and therefore all of our other prospects suck too. It's science, don't dispute it.
Oneiro
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- Mar 28, 2013
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Not surprising but talk about a pathetic smokescreen based on semantics. Every single one of those guys will be on their teams for a decade plus as a meaningful contributor, whereas we likely say goodbye to Zacha after his next RFA deal. This organization missed in the same fashion it missed the prior decade but it did so at a critical juncture. There is zero excuse for not coming away with any of those guys mentioned, let alone the guy at 16.
Even Will Butcher, who I'm no huge fan of, has done more than the whole group of Larsson, Gelinas, Urbom, Santini, Merrill, etc. all of whom at best could be described as grenade handlers at the NHL level. Paul Martin was drafted twenty years ago and the organization that's supposed to know what a great defender looks like can't find one better than him over the next fifteen years? And they are gifted a No. 4 overall that's supposed to be the ideal two-way defenseman and they can't develop anything in his game other than the ability to hit people occasionally?
You can digress about McLeod all you want but two picks from that 2016 draft have already been turned into NHL players. There is nothing you are accusing Shero/Castron/Fitzgerald of that hasn't first been done by Lou and Conte.
You have followed prospects for 2 decades and this is your conclusion - this happens in literally every draft, all the time. Just imagine what'll happen to your brain when you get to the 162nd pick that year.
