La-La-Laprise said:
By you stating you are an olympiques fan that autpmatically makes you Bias.
Did you see what Guy Carbonneau was saying? He said Vagner has gone backwards. And he works for Dallas, the team that drafted him. It is not only MY opinion that Vagner sucks but other more important people agree with me.
Maybe the problem with Vagner is that we're holding him up to the standards of a 1st round NHL pick. By other standards, he seems to be a decentish sort of junior defenseman, who, as long as he's not as far off his game as he was against Medicine Hat, might garner enough attention to be drafted, because he has pretty solid fundamentals and is reputedly fairly bright and dedicated, and a team might figure they can teach him something. He was not an overall detriment to his team in his junior career, but you know, we could say that about a guy like Sam Roberts too, who was just fine for Gatineau, but isn't thought of as an NHL prospect.
And his play has certainly levelled at the least, from his draft year. Despite the injury this year, it's doubtful he would have surpassed his 34 pt rookie year. But it was better than last year at least. If you argue that points don't matter, he's a stay-at-home guy, fair enough, but he hasn't seemed to improve in that respect much either to me. And he wasn't drafted with the thought that he'd be a purely stay-at-home guy, I think. He was pretty heavily hyped in his draft year (wasn't he top-10 amongst NA skaters by CSB?) and some mock drafts were putting him in the mid-teens as a pick. He was on the Czech national teams from an early age, and was on people's radar for a long time. NHL team scouts must have been getting an inkling that maybe he wasn't quite all he was cracked up to be, because he did fall quite a lot lower than his rankings indicated, in what was not a stupendous 2002 draft.
Sometimes it just happens. A guy hits his peak as a prospect at 17, and never gets any better. That seems to be Vagner. The Stars can be happy with the compensatory system the NHL has in place, because here they're maybe getting a bit of an unintended advantage, as it was supposed to help protect against 1st round players asking for too much money, not to protect against making bad draft choices.
