[nickerjones]

Originally Posted by driveway

Here are this year's top 20 scoring centres and their draft position.

Stamkos - 1
Crosby -1
E. Staal -2
Datsyuk - 171
Getzlaf - 19
Ribeiro - 45
Toews - 3
Backstrom - 4
Tavares - 1
Sedin - 3
Stepan - 51
Kadri - 7
Duchene - 3
Kopitar - 11
Thornton - 1
Tlusty - 13
Gagner - 6
Couture - 9
Koivu - 6
Hodgson - 10

Based on this list, it seems pretty obvious that it's very, very difficult to find a top-scoring center outside of the top 10 in the draft. Also, of the players on this list, only Thornton, Hodgson, Ribiero and Tlusty are not playing for the team they were drafted by, demonstrating that it's extremely difficult to acquire a #1 centre through trade.

Based on this, and having watched the Flames overall lack of success over the last couple of decades without that #1 I think it would be a huge, huge mistake not to draft a centre with our selection.

I won't go postal if we take Nurse. From what I understand his ceiling is up in the Pronger/Niedermayer/Chara neighbourhood, but I would really like a centre.

A lot higher odds than I thought... 30% of them were drafted outside of the top 10.