Quote:
Originally Posted by The Original FFIV
Looked at the standings and if the season ended today, we would have the 10th overall pick in the draft, barring a lottery win. Only Western teams below us are Winnipeg and of course Edmonton.
That is bat sh*t crazy, considering we are year 1 of a rebuild. 10th overall in a subpar draft year that is not deep in D is not where we need to be in order to get better. I realize that we are not even past the quarter post of the season and lots of hockey to be played but if patterns hold, there will be a lot of Eastern teams picking ahead of us.
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There are about 7 good forwards in this draft, and only 2 or 3 good d-men (Other than Ekblad, the forwards are all better than the remaining D). If we pick outside the top 4 (or wherever Ekblad gets picked) then we should draft a forward. I would then focus more on defense perhaps through the rest of the draft, unless there was a significantly better forward up at the time.
We could focus on either acquiring some support in the defense corp through free agency or trade. There are guys like Boyle, Markov, Timonen, Zidlicky, Orpik, Mitchell, Tallinder, Girardi, Robidas, Ericsson are free agents at the end of the year. We could sign one or two and have a decent team. Unfortunately, young defense will be an issue for a while, but you can add stop gaps like some of those above while hoping guys like Brodie, Sieloff and Wotherspoon take off and emerge as quality defenders long term. It's also not necessarily a bad thing to have veterans on the defense corp when you have a young team.