Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
One other thing when we go back in 3 to 5 years to evaluate this pick its Mckowen we should compare him to as that seems to be the guy most people would havevrather picked. You dont get to compare him to one of the 5 defensemen still available as we can only pick one.
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This line of thinking is patently ridiculous. Professional scouts are clearly not soothsayers; able to peer into the future to see what befalls prospective professional hockey players on their journey to the NHL. They are clearly much better at making projections than everyone else—especially the casual fan—but they are still limited by the information they have at hand. No one can know what will happen in the course of two or three years to affect the development of any one player; Shea Webber was a mid-second round pick in large part because no one foresaw a tremendous growth spurt in his future.
To compare this pick to McKeown makes no sense, since
fourteen teams passed on him in the intervening picks, and Buffalo passed on him twice. Clearly, there is something in McKeown's game at present that sufficiently convinced most NHL scouts to hold off on him until the late second round. To put it another way, every team in the NHL who had the opportunity to draft John Gaudreau and didn't should not be faulted for their decision. Good for the Flames to take him, but they got lucky. At the time he was drafted, there was no good reason to be convinced that he would be as good as he is today, and he had everything working against him. Who knows why, but there is a reason McKeown slipped, and it most likely is a very good one.