[Five-hole]

I spent quite a while poring over drafts of the last 10 years tonight and noticed a significant trend. The first round produces players most of the time. It seems like, outside of the top 3-5 players, you have a 33% chance of getting a star, 33% of getting a player, and 33% chance of getting a bust. But it's outside of the first round where teams really make hay. The teams that get players in the 2nd rounds and later are those that seems to somehow compete every year, whether or not they have a high payroll.

Listing a couple of 2nd and later picks from these teams, they're the usual suspects: Boston (Lucic, Marchand, Bergeron), Detroit (Franzen, Abdelkader, Helm), New Jersey (Henrique), Colorado (Stasty, Galiardi, O'Reilly), Nashville (Hornqvist, Rinne, Kostitsyn), Montreal (Streit, Subban), Dallas (Benn, Neal).

The Flames' drafting record is, as well all know, just deplorable. Absolutely disgusting. Shameful. I'm not sure you could find a worse record, perhaps save Columbus who have squandered top picks like it's some secret contest we're unaware of. But the number of players that the Flames have put into the NHL from outside of the first round is shamefully small.

This is, of course, compounded with the sad fact that our first rounders have made almost zero impact since we drafted Derek fricking Morris. Phaneuf was the only valuable first rounder we'd had in a long time and we all know what happened there. Following that, we have the illustrious streak of Chucko, Pelech, Irving, and Nemisz. Woop.

Then we get the next string. Backlund may yet be a player, though certainly no star. Erixon, well ... then we have the first lost to acquire Jokinen, and then we have the Feaster era, which is far too early to judge.

So, in hindsight, outside of the Kipprusoff, Huselius, and Langkow trades, it could possibly be said that Darryl Sutter put this team thousands of years into the dark ages with the drafting and the asset management he oversaw. The Phaneuf trade was disastrous. So was the Jokinen trade (perhaps in hindsight only). Lydman for a 3rd was stupid. Darryl's drafting was fourteen kinds of awful. How the eff do you pick a winger from Junior B over the center?! The most glaring positional need of this team for TWO DECADES and you pick a cement-hands, poor-skating winger from junior B? Jesus. Chucko is just one example, but ...

On the flip side, Darryl-the-coach managed to squeeze every last drop out of a team led by probably the NHL's best player and the best goalie this organization has ever had for one memorable run and a few years of decent performance, and we've been so starved for success over the last 30 years that that was enough to give us hope that we could continue to live off the spoils of it. For the last decade, ONE PLAYOFF RUN was enough to make us think we had the horses to compete, and management has conducted affairs as though they believe the same thing.

The management of this team has been downright pathetic.

God love 'em, there's been a lot of players playing their hearts out for this team, and I've watched 95% of the games every year for the last decade and will continue to do so. But the direction of this team should be plainly evident at this point: downwards.

Caveat: I'm hammered. Sorry for the rant.