Teams that draft well and have quantity working in their favor is the trend I noticed. Having patience is also key. You can only do so much in facilitating good development environments IMO. The kid turns into who they are at some point. If you rush them, might take longer.
agreed you can only do so much but what I think you overlook is the impact that rushing these kids or not putting them in the best position to succeed, has on their confidence and how much confidence means to players.
My question to people that don't put much stock in coaching, development is simple, not directed at just you but for anyone that played the game at any organized level, have you ever had a coach that just seemed to get the best out of you, no matter how either by what he says or does, but a coach that you feel gets you and that you feel has helped improved your game? I know I have had good and bad coaches so to me it means more then it would to others who maybe didn't have that experience.
Of course I could be wrong and just put too much into it, but you see how teams can turn things around quickly after the fire their coach. Of course there are tons of factors/variables into why and each would need to be looked at on it's own merit since each will be about different reasons why they turned it around.
I just think with the right coach, and if you work on building up the players confidence, put them in the right position to find success, it is a better way to go. Of course you won't turn a Connor Crisp into Super Mario, no would would ever suggest that of course, but when you have Beaulieu put up 28 pts in the NHL at age 23/24, clearly he has a decent amount of NHL skill. When McCarron was putting up close to a point per game in the AHL as a 20 year old rookie, and then can't even produce the same amount of points that he had in one month for the rest of the season, something is not right there. Who is to blame, what % of each group of management, coaching, scouting, development team, and player, well to me it's really more just semantics as we can't know who is really to blame since we don't have all the details since we aren't at practice or in the locker room.
But to me the biggest red flag is when you have the same scout and you have success at developing players under said scout and then for the next 6 years under different management, coaching and development team, you get almost nothing from your AHL team then I never understood how anyone could look at that situation and not say something is rotten here. Now to what degree, who holds more blame, I have been harder on Lefebvre but have also said all along that all parties involved share in the blame to some degree.
Either way we need to do a better job and hopefully that's happening under Bouchard, so far we haven't seen much in terms of call ups that played for him outside of a handful of games from Fleury and now there's Poehling although I wouldn't have put either in the NHL this year and Poehling has barely played for Bouchard.
Nothing more we could of done to develop players like Hudon, DLR, Scherbak, Beaulieu, Tinordi, etc. Maybe a better AHL team would help but how much? Not as much as you think
It could also be more then you think, it's very hard to know when we have so little info to go off other then watching them play and let's face it, how many people on this board watch a lot of our AHL team every year? So really they don't have a lot to go off other then when they get called up to the NHL or seeing them in preseason games (which I put very little stock in)
I do think 100% that some of the players would have faired better if handled differently, the question is by how much would it have mattered and that I can't answer and don't think anyone really can.
With Beaulieu and Galchenyuk, you can't teach IQ. They are who they are
that is true you can't teach IQ but how much can working with them improve it? We saw Beaulieu play better when he was paired with Gonchar, who he said helped him by talking to him. Now could he have ever been a better player if he had someone like Gonchar to work with him at 20 and they didn't rush him to the NHL. Of course that wasn't the only issue with him and he wouldn't be the only 1st round player that never lived up to the hype despite having the skill but not having the smarts. If it was just Beaulieu or Galchenyuk or Scherbak or DLR, or McCarron, or Tinordi or others but when all of them well that should set off alarm bells imo.