Mayor Bee
Registered User
- Dec 29, 2008
- 18,085
- 531
Actually the Wings have a history of finding players deep in the draft so I wouldn't exactly say they got lucky with them. Maybe lucky because they are both possible Hall of Famers, but they find lots of quality players deep in the draft.
No they do not; it's a myth created by people too slow to be able to actually find patterns and too lazy to actually do some research.
From 1990-2004, a span of 15 NHL drafts, Detroit's round after the third round doesn't stand out compared to anyone else. There's Datsyuk and Zetterberg, dozens of guys who never played in the NHL, and a small handful of serviceable players who were all traded before making an impact in the league. 1990 had Jason York, who was moved as part a five-piece deal in which the two biggest parts were Mike Sillinger and a 6th-rounder. Mike Knuble had 14 points with Detroit before being moved as part of a deal involving conditional draft picks. Dan McGillis never played with Detroit at all.
The only played in those 15 drafts who were taken after the 3rd round and played more than 500 games with Detroit are Datsyuk, Zetterberg, and Tomas Holmstrom. Drop it down to 400 and no one else gets added to that list, although Jonathan Ericsson could hit that by the end of this season. If you expand it to include players who hit 500 games elsewhere, you can only add McGillis, Knuble, and York to the list.
In that same time span, Los Angeles picked up Robert Lang, Alexei Zhitnik, Kimmo Timonen, Joe Corvo, and Lubomir Visnovsky. For depth players there's Rem Murray, Eric Belanger, George Parros, and Cristobal Huet.
The Rangers turned up Sergei Zubov, Sergei Nemchinov, Marc Savard, Todd Marchant, Kim Johnsson, Henrik Lundqvist, Mike York, Marek Zidlicky, and Ryan Callahan.
How about Ottawa? Pavol Demitra, Daniel Alfredsson, Sami Salo, Andreas Dackell, Brian Elliott, Ray Emery, and depth in Chris Neil, Brooks Laich, Greg Zanon, and Karel Rachunek.
Nashville turned up Karlis Skrastins, Martin Erat, Jordin Tootoo, and Pekka Rinne in just seven of those drafts.
San Jose? Evgeni Nabokov, Marcus Ragnarsson, Miikka Kiprusoff, Vaclav Varada, Douglas Murray, Mikael Samuelsson, Christian Ehrhoff, Ryane Clowe, Joe Pavelski, Torrey Mitchell.
Why is late-round drafting always treated like the exclusive domain of Detroit?