I believe that you win thanks principally to top 11's. Your top 2 lines, thus 6 forwards, your top 4 Dmen and your starting goalie. These are valued assets and are rarely available in trade or reasonable free agency. Only poor GM's would trade away a top 11 player, unless he is certain of getting one back. And unless you are a very poor GM, you should never trade a top 11 for a player(s) who is not in the top 11. It is the Stone for Brannstrom trade (let's hope that Sokolov develops into a top 11).
Free agency can get you a top 11..but they are 27 and older, will want big dollars and the transplant can be "a shock". Hello Dadonov. Perhaps the best example of a huge mistake may come to be, Tavares.
So, you had better draft yourself a top 11 contingent. The bulk you keep, the rest you may trade. And you will, thanks to being in a small market, lose some in free agency. Failure to do so, will mean poor results, an insufficient supply to use in trades and as some leave, your stock will be empty.
You live and die by your supply of top 11's. I don't impose this on Ottawa alone. You can painstakingly go through the entire league. And you will notice that from year one to about year 14/15 prior to any one season, a team that has done well in its top 11 drafting, is doing well in its play. In some instances, very few of those top 11 it may have drafted are still with them, but they were most likely used in trades to acquire top 11's. Best example: Mark Methot for Nick Foligno, a key in the 17 ECF. Heatly for Hossa (long term mistake, short term trip to the Cup Final in 07).
There is no magic. Analysis may show Ottawa has done better than Tampa in terms of total players in the league since about 2000. And yes, they have played more games. And collectively more points. I did that exercise 4 years ago. I even corrected for the round and pick number. I was so proud!! I thought that I had discovered new science...Well 3 cups for Tampa and a 4th appearance. 3 added trips to the ECF. Then I redid the analysis based purely on top 11 assessment. They ate the Sens lunch. Who cares if three to four, 3rd line player plays 10 years and get 300 points each. You need a 1st line player to play 10 years and get 800.
As for them being an average NHL drafting team. Again, inconsistent with the results. And any argument of "small market" and not keeping players, is not backed by reality. For 14 years, they stood at the podium and missed way more than they hit in rounds 1 and 2. And their 3-6/7/8 (as they may have existed) fared only marginally better. Hockeydb is available to you.
Is hockeydb really available to me?? OMG all problems solved! Except it doesn't when you still look at things based on your own bias and cherry pick specific years to believe you proved a point.
You mentioned that Ottawa had 6 of these top 11 players drafted between 2002-2014. Here's a list of players from that period that fit the bill:
Karlsson
Zibanejad
Hoffman
Stone
Foligno
Silfverberg
Ceci
Lehner
That's 8. Is Ceci a top 11? Yup. What about Silfverberg? I think so, maybe you don't. But there's more:
Meszaros
Pageau
Elliot
All 3 of these are debatable. But I'd take Pageau as a hockey player over Hoffman or Silfverberg any day of the week, and he was valuable enough to net a 1st round pick in a trade. Elliot has played over 500 games in the NHL and been a #1 at times in his career. Traded for Ottawa's' best ever goalie in Craig Anderson. Meszaros was a top 4 for Ottawa while he was here, and was subsequently traded for a top 11 player in Filip Kuba.
This doesn't include a couple of 20 goal scorers in Eaves and Smith. I'll stick with 8 players over that time frame though since there should be no debating those, even though your number was 6.
2002-2007 was an especially dry time that you needed to point out. Ottawa had these slots respectively in the first round:
16, 29, 23, 9, 28, 29. You must realize that picks in the bottom 3rd of the first are not typically going to land you marquee players, and the 2 years that they picked above that were not especially good years.
You are not equating quality of picks and quality of drafts into your analysis. You made a point earlier that you'd like Edmonton's drafting record, so let's look at that instead of using the 2 time Stanley Cup champion Lightning as a benchmark. Which is typical when most people look at their own team and compare it to others - they show the best of the best to prove that we're the worst. Nooo, we're just not the best.
Edmonton's "top 11" from 2002-2014:
Hall
Draisaitl
RNH
Nurse
Klefbom
Eberle
Petry
Gagner
Dubnyk
Seems like they have more than Ottawa here, and better quality. But how did they get all this? By BEING a poor drafting team, sucking, and finishing at the bottom of the league. During this period they had 3 #1 picks, a #3, a #6, and a #7. Only time Ottawa drafted in that range was when they were able to select Zibanejad and he wasn't even a top 5. Only one player in that list was drafted outside the first round (Petry)
I've been analyzing draft statistics using hockeydb and other sources for the better part of 20 years. You can spin the data in all kinds of ways and come up with some differing conclusions. I would only ever take my observations and put them out there for discussion, because I don't think a lot of it is definitive proof, just a point of view. So telling people that hockeydb is there and to do their own analysis when theirs is still bound by opinion is kinda arrogant.
