Right. 2014 is a bad draft, and was thought to be so at the time. Still, the Devils did very bad even considering that.
I’m not disagreeing with you other than there’s too much focus on the Devils doing terrible in drafts with no zero depth when they had no early picks. They did badly when it was a lot harder to do well but that’s understandable. What do I think is Conte’s most disastrous draft and my least favorite?
| | 2009 |
1 | 20 | Jacob Josefson |
2 | 54 | Eric Gelinas |
3 | 73 | Alexander Urbom |
4 | 114 | Seth Helgeson |
5 | 144 | Derek Rodwell |
6 | 174 | Ashton Bernard |
7 | 204 | Curtis Gedwig |
[THEAD]
[/THEAD]
[TBODY]
[/TBODY]
[Note: I actually own a JaJo jersey because I love our boys, just not this draft.]
Why? Because that draft was also fantastic, 55.2% made the NHL. Many teams loaded up and we got crap, that’s why they were good and we were bad.
Anaheim got Palmieri (26) and Vatanen (106). Minny got Nick Leddy (16), Kuemper (161) and Haula (182). Nashville picked Ryan Ellis at 11, then added Craig Smith (98) and Mattias Ekholm (102). NYI got Tavares obviously, and Calvin de Haan (12), Anders Nilsson (62), Casey Cizikas (92) and Anders Lee (152). Colorado Duchene (3), O’Reilly (33) and Berrie (64).
More teams just got NHL players. Washington got Mojo (24), Dr Orlov (55) and Cody Eakin (85). Hell, Buffalo drafted Zack Kassian (13), Brayden McNabb (66) and Marcus Foligno (104) with their first three picks. I looove Sens drafting around this time, Silfverberg (39), Lehner (46) and Hoffman (130) is pretty sweet haul. Even Atlanta found Ben Chaiarot (120) to join Evander Kane at 3rd overall. Nothing quite beats getting out-drafted in the late rounds by the Thrashers. I could go on.
We traded the 23 and 84 pick to get a talented injury report on skates who scored 60 points in 276GP, a hard shot from the point we used to swindle a 3rd round pick from Col and two defensive prospects that were discussed on this board for what felt like 14 years. That’s perhaps understandable in a bad draft but if you can’t even get one roster player even out of this draft we probably deserved our fate.
Several other teams forgot to get on the bags of gold line even if this was a very generous draft. Montreal got zilch, but 2007 went pretty well for them. If teams made it up in other drafts in a big way it’s not an issue, but we obviously didn’t. Vancouver, our sister draft screw-up at the time, also screwed up again. They got high octane bust Jordon Schroeder at 22 and some absolute garbage too in some weird mirror image of sadness. I’m rambling...
My point is at least in 2011 they got Larsson, even if it took a lottery win, but they got him and later Coleman bloomed. 2008 is another legendary draft, less depth at 50.7%, but the talent level is unreal. There’s more than just Carlson taken after Tedenby, but we did get Henrique at 82. They got jack shit in 2009 and compounding that with only getting a one good player a couple great drafts and bombing bad drafts all adds up to not enough talent. (I know, news flash!) Not even getting one functional NHLer out of 2009 is just the nadir to me.