If you look at what was available for the Preds in their expansion draft, it shouldn't be a surprise why they pummelled us for as long as they did. They got valuable, young pieces. We got Sanderson and Odelein (Spacek).
Mike Dunham
Tomas Vokoun
Andrew Brunette
Scott Walker
Kimmo Timonen for not taking Gary Galley
They didn't have a dumbass running their team.
Just to use the 2000 expansion draft, Nabokov was available and San Jose desperately wanted to keep him in their system. They traded with both Columbus and Minnesota.
Minnesota agreed to not take Nabokov and also sent San Jose an 8th-rounder; they received Andy Sutton, a 3rd-rounder, and a 7th-rounder. Columbus received a 9th-rounder, a conditional 2001 pick (that was apparently not fulfilled), and Jan Caloun.
Sutton was 25, had played 70+ NHL games the previous two seasons, and looked like he could stick in the league. Caloun was 28, had been out of North America for three seasons, and had shown that he could
not stick unless the conditions of the game favored a wide-open style (which in 2000 was quite clearly not the case).
There was plenty available in the expansion draft to do one of two things:
- Be respectable early, and/or
- Accumulate enough guys who could be traded within the first two years to contending teams for a good return
But more often than not, Dougie was taking the 3rd- or 4th-best overall option from one position group from his own team. Jonas Andersson-Junkka had never played in North American before and was 25; to take him, Dougie passed on Peter Popovic, John Slaney, Dan Trebil, and Stefan Bergqvist. Out of five defensemen Pittsburgh exposed, he took the 5th-best option.
But it wasn't just Andersson-Junkka over the other four. It was Mattias Timander over Don Sweeney, Robert Kron over Andrei Kovalenko and Martin Gelinas, Radim Bicanek over Kevin Dean and Doug Zmolek, Jamie Pushor over Shawn Chambers and Sylvain Cote, and at least ten more like this.
Far be it from me to psychoanalyze someone (possibly because I'm not qualified, possibly because I remember Gene Mauch's "not one of you in this room is smart enough to analyze me!"), but this all sums up Doug's shortfalls as a GM.
1) He's incredibly impulsive. This would bear out time and time and time again during his tenure, but he vacillates between having limitless patience and no patience. He had endless patience with his prospects, and then would swing wildly to the other side at the drop of a hat. Trust me; I'm impulsive and I recognize this in others.
Look at the expansion draft itself. He starts off by saying that he wants a physical, grinding team, then takes Geoff Sanderson with the first pick of forwards.
2) He's charismatic. This is a positive at times, but there's a bad tendency with charismatic individuals to both overstate their ability to get things done
and to believe in their own genius. Kiel McLeod says he won't sign anywhere if he's drafted? He hasn't met
me yet; he'll change his mind. Tyler Wright hasn't looked like an NHL player since the day he was drafted? That'll change; I wouldn't think drafting him was a great idea if it wasn't going to change. Dallas Drake doesn't want to play for an expansion team? Give
me five minutes of talking to him and we'll see who wants to play where.
3) By believing in himself to a fault, he becomes blind to other possibilities. Tunnel vision, if you will. A grinding team makes sense in certain conditions, a wide-open team in other conditions. Dave King made sense as a Tortorella-lite coach under certain conditions; it made no sense with a veteran-laden expansion team. The actual process of the draft, and the expansion draft, seemed to catch him off guard. This is why 2002 was so shocking to me: the possibility existed of getting caught in a very unfavorable position, and he made an aggressive move to go up and not get caught. It's possibly the only example of true foresight he demonstrated in seven years.