I really feel it is very difficult to point the finger at anyone in particular and say: "This is why our drafting sucks!".
You have to look at the whole drafting and development programs as a whole, rather than just the guy in charge at the time. It is easy to criticize Feaster (in his Tampa days) and Sutter with Calgary, and say these guys 'suck' at drafting.
A high-end scouting department takes a lot of time to put together, and even more time to figure out if it is 'working' or not.
Had Darryl not been pressing management to take full control of an AHL squad so the Flames would be better able to develop their own prospects and put them in positions to best succeed in the future, and had he not been trying to improve the scouting by adding additional scouts, and most importantly - had he not been finally getting some 'hits' on some of his picks, I would definitely agree that his scouting sucked.
When you go over the past drafts from the end of Craig Button's tenure, to the present day, you start to see a bit more of a pattern. There IS improvement there, and a shift of philosophies. You can justifiably argue that it came 'too late', but at least it finally came. Is it perfect now? Nope, not by a longshot - but it is unquestionably becoming better.
You really have to gauge the drafts on a year by year basis, see who was drafted, and see where they went after they were drafted and for how long. You then have to see who were the scouting staff composed of. Todd I thought wasn't very good for a while - I would figure him alone scouting would have had at least a hit here and there for a while, but it was very rare. It got better with time - I think he became more seasoned at his role, and he got additional help and more eyes out there. I would think it takes a while to learn the craft of amateur scouting much more than being a pro scout. Pro scouting is all about "what you see is what you get" for the most part, while trying to see if a certain player could possibly be trending up or become a really good fit for the organization. Amateur scouting I think is much more complex.
It would be interesting to note who really identified "hockey IQ" as being the seemingly most important trait - was it Sutter? Todd? Was it another scout? It definitely started coming about from the 2010 draft, as I never once heard it coming from Calgary before that (and at the time, thought it might just be a 'smokescreen' to try and make the picks sound sexier than they were). Seems to be a good move in the right direction as a drafting philosophy for the Flames lately.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but I look at a team like Edmonton and I am so glad that the Flames are not like them. They didn't have any real pieces to help their rebuild, and since their rebuild started, they have had very little come through the pipe outside of their first-rounders. They are a fairly wealthy team, and it seems their scouting department has not been very good.
I was hoping that the Flames would have grabbed Mark Jankowski's uncle, Ryan Jankowski. Seems he had quite a number of hits on his selections deeper down the draft. This is not to say I don't like Weisbrod, or Todd Button now, but that finding good people to fill and expand your scouting department really does pay off more than any other department I think. I just hope the Flames continually look to add to their drafting program and continue to tweak it.
The one thing I do really give credit to Feaster was that he came in and didn't just blindly axe everyone (which most at the time would probably have been happy with) and try and rebuild the scouting department. Probably would have resulted in a few horrible drafts at arguably the worst time in franchise history. Flames were a fantastic drafting team in the 80's not only because they scouted the NCAA thoroughly, but because they had a fairly large scouting department as compared to other teams. Hope they keep adding to their scouting department and continue to get more hits in the later rounds.
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