Quote:
Originally Posted by Cleveland Steam Whistle
In the NHL you should draft BPA, even if your the Oilers. Not sure the Oilers want to drop down 2 spots in the draft just to add Wotherspoon, they may actually have 6 Wotherspoon's this time.
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In the NHL its almost impossible to trade for top 3 d-men. So if you don't draft them you may never have them. And you can't win without them as they should very well know after the last however many years.
https://soundcloud.com/tsn-radio-van...e-a-head-coach
The last half of this Craig Button interviews references that very thing in regards to whether the Canucks should take a d-man or trade down and take a d-man. The same concept applies to the Oilers.
So perhaps teams should have a policy of not ranking wingers above top 3 dmen in the draft. You can have as many theoretical 70 point wingers as you want but if you can't defend and you have nobody to move the puck up to said wingers you'll go nowhere fast and never win a thing. You win in this league more with centres, d-men and goalies then you do with wingers. The best winger of this generation (Ovechkin) can't drag his team anywhere it would seem. Chris Pronger dragged a mediocre EDM to the cup finals.
So maybe the BPA for EDM and VAN should be a defensemen even if all the scouts love Tkachuk this draft. It's perfectly good reasoning as to why both teams should be exploring the idea of trading down a couple spots. Both VAN and EDM are arguably much too weak at the defense position to be considering drafting a winger.