You think the Wings have altered their development approach since 2000?
Drastically of course. 2000 was pre-cap era, and pre-dated the notorious "overripe" philosophy that itself is in the rear view.
Pre-cap/golden age Red Wings took a pretty hands off approach to development. They weren't going to have high picks, but they had all the time in the world to reload elsewhere if needed, so they could afford to spend all their picks on less than NHL ready talents, and over the course of time wait for a few of them to develop completely and emerge as elite players.
These days the Red Wings are swinging to the opposite pole, and are relying on strict in house development, with guys like Horcoff, Fischer, Cleary, Draper etc, littered through the ranks, curating players that have been targeted for specific roles on specific timelines. They have 3 extremely young centers that have top of the draft pedigrees, that they have to make sure complete the transition from blue chip young
forward, to complete NHL center. The entire future of the organization will be determined by the effectiveness of the Red Wings development approach in the post-Babcock era.
So you think the only thing that foiled the Oilers rebuild was not having enough Vaneks and Nielsens, and ntot that guys like Yakupov were poor picks? Is RNH a McDavid clone if they'd given him some mediocre, replacement-level guys to play with?
That's a false dichotomy, so no I don't think that specifically. Obviously the failures that lead to that level of ineptitude are various.
Could RNH potentially be a little more potent on offense and more of a gamebreaking force, if he had spent his early years on the wing of someone like Zetterberg, finding his offense, and playing an otherwise limited role, instead of spearheading a broken team as a teenager, fighting an uphill battle to keep the other team off the scoreboard, playing 20 minutes a game, and probably spending more time in ice baths than the gym? Yeah, I feel like RNH is a great example, whether it actually applies to him or not, of how scouts may be right on a guy, he might have what it takes internally, but still situationally/environmentally things don't go right.
Other times scouts simply overrate players, or players fail themselves somehow. I don't follow Yakupov or RNH closely enough to have a theory as to which one of those 3 categories they fall in mainly. I do know that the difficulties that Edmonton had with their rebuild resulted in an environment that couldn't possibly be ideal for player development.
Reducing established NHL talent to "mediocre" or "replacement level", is misleading and counter productive imo. The skillset and actual aptitude of replacement level players varies to a huge degree, and the implication of the term is much different in the NHL than it is in MLB. To me, this highlights one of my main points, which is how truly risky it gets in hockey, once you take to rooting around in a pool of literally hundreds and hundreds of potential candidates.
The skillset an established NHL veteran presents, vs a semi-pro journeymen or teenager... it takes time to develop either way. Guys that can have a positive impact on your team out of the box are extremely few and far between and are almost exclusively NHL vets. It's way harder to translate performance in europe, juniors, college or semi-pro, into sustained performance in the NHL, than it is to translate the performance of a player in AAA with a WAR of 4.3 or whatever.
Sure. And yet teams find elite players just about every year. Well, most teams do. We haven't since the 90s.
I don't think you could back up the claim that most teams find elite players just about every year. The league would be teeming with elite players if that were the case.
And even more rare is it that an unheralded prospect or journeymen accidentally finds his way to a roster spot and blows everyone mind, which is more to the point of this specific discussion.
And I don't think the Red Wings draft record in the 90's or any era is all that impressive. They drafted more elite players in 1989 than any other combined decade. Which again, I think really drives home the point how fruitless the landscape gets once you leave the top few hundred players in the world, whose ages range from 18-42