The question is why do our draft picks never really pan out? I would hesitate to blame the scouting, it's not like Barkov, Huberdeau, Gudbranson etc were all projected as 2nd rounders and we came out of nowhere to pick them. If we hadn't taken them it's likely they would have only dropped a position or two.
You can blame the scouts for not finding players in the later rounds, but again it's not like other teams were picking them up. Everyone points to Detroit drafting quality players in the later rounds as an example of good scouting, but if you really thought Pavel Datsyuk was going to be a hall of famer then why did you wait until the 6th round to take him? That's a scouting failure in my book.
So is it the systems and the coaching? If the coaching is the problem you would expect our draft picks to blossom elsewhere once they leave. Is there a consistent pattern of that happening? I don't know, I haven't run the numbers. Niklas Hagman had better numbers after he left here, but not amazing or anything. I mean, go through our high draft picks and really look at what they did after leaving here.
Weiss has been often injured, but even when he was playing he wasn't scoring on a much better Detroit team.
Krajicek played 5 seasons on 3 different teams after Florida and then bounced out of the league.
Bouwmeester has never put up the same numbers he put up here; he can't even crack 7 goals a year let alone the 12, 15 and 15 and 40+ pts he had here.
Horton's production has been basically the same in Boston and Columbus.
Olesz only played 16 games in the NHL after Florida and had 2 points.
David Booth fell off the face of the earth but I guess you could say he was never the same after the injury.
Kenndal McArdle had 0 pts in 9 games for Winnipeg, and is out of the league.
Frolik's career best seasons are still with Florida, though he came within 3 points of his career high this last season in Winnipeg. Still, he was relegated to the bottom lines in Chicago and given the ice time back in Winnipeg basically went back to what he was when he was here.
Keaton Ellerby has done nothing special since leaving here.
Markstrom was just as terrible behind a better Vancouver team as he was here.
Kulikov, Gudbranson, Bjugstad, Howden, Huberdeau, Barkov and Ekblad are of course all still here.
So why are our picks always terrible? Are they bad picks or did we turn them into bad players? If we turned them into bad players it must have been permanent because none of them really went on to play at a significantly higher level than they did here. I guess the real test would be to try and find some picks that Florida made who got traded before they ever played here and see how they ended up developing. I don't know of anyone off the top of my head.
Kuba only played a handful of games here before he went on to have a pretty solid career elsewhere so maybe one person? Alex Auld was traded before he played any games here but he turned out to be a career backup and nothing special. Kvasha had a career best 51 pts with the Islanders but that looks like a pretty big abberation considering his point totals were 25, 25, 20, 38, 26, 21 and 11 the rest of his career. I'm looking down the list of all time Florida draft picks who have played NHL games and nobody really sticks out at me.
I don't know that there is a real answer or that we'll ever have the data to say with certainty.
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