Quote:
Originally Posted by sun
We all lambast the oilers for taking the "consensus" #1 pick when they were all undersized forwards. Yes, oilers are easy pickin's, but still. What if oilers pick #1 again this year and select Reinhart instead of Ekblad? We'd all have a field day and rightly so, even if Reinhart becomes the consensus #1.
Jones was #1 or #2 going into the draft on every list and he dropped to the preds.
People in this thread are saying draft the centre, not the dman since they are so close. Well one of them has to be BPA, so why not pick that one? Because maybe if Ekblad is slightly better (or equal); good teams are strong down the middle, dmen are harder to predict, dmen take longer to develop, etc.
Flyers had a draft video last year where they have all their first round names on a list. Monahan was on there, say 4-6th (can't remember exactly). They debate their list and go back and forth and suddenly Monahan has dropped to ~13th with ALL the players who passed him being dman in the span of a single meeting. Why? Flyers wanted to pick a dman. And they did, even though half the players picked between Morin(?) and Monahan were forwards (ie, they would have passed on Horvat and Nich too if they were available).
You can't just blindly pick BPA with no regards to your organizational needs. People band the BPA drum, but it ain't that easy. I could be convinced otherwise of course, but that's my opinion.
Now, our team has so many holes, any of the top players will fill one, but my vote is Ekblad.
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If the Oilers ever figured out that they could get a great dman if they traded one of their young Turks (Hall, RNH, Eberle, Yakupov or whoever) then they'd be on the way to a better team. They don't because they have poor management. Flames traded Hull for Ramage, Gilmour, Wamsley and loom how that turned out for them.
BPA just makes sense. You end up with a glut of centres? Teams ALWAYS need a centre and you can trade for your needs. Pretty hard to try and pick positions for what you'll need 5 years down the road because circumstances always change.