[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by IamNotKenKing

I am not sure I agree with this.
I think the best course of action is to build all three ways:
1) Draft and develop;
2) Trade for controlled players;
3) Sign UFAs.

In that order.

Suggesting the Flames are taking shortcuts is not true, in my opinion.

The Flames draft with the frequency usually reserved for teams in the midst of competing for or already having won the cup. They draft less than their rebuilding peers. They draft less frequently in the top 45-60 than their peers. Until the Monahan draft, i believe the Flames were the only organization in the league besides Dallas to not have made 3 picks in the first round in a single draft.

The Flames draft worse, and less often than their peers. So, they aren't even doing #1 on your list properly.

Now, the debate is whether the trades were right or wrong, but you cannot 100% build through the draft. You need a bit of each one.

Drafting dictates the quality of trades you can make and the quality of UFAs you can sign.

Good drafting gives you more valuable assets than just draft picks that allow you to move those more valuable assets to beat out other teams offering picks or lesser assets. The larger your stable of tradeable assets, the better your organization will be able to capitalize on trades. The Flames basically never have prospects they are willing to move because they have so few of them in the first place, which means they have to move picks. This helps the cycle bottom out and forces the flames to compete with higher volume of picks than a lower volume of better assets. The package that gets Hamilton is not the package that gets Seth Jones. Johansen is what gets Seth Jones. The Flames rarely move out roster players for picks, further bottoming out the cycle.

In a perfect world your drafted players mature over time.
Here we have the young core of Monahan, Johnny, Tkachuk, Bennett and Ferland, with Brodie, Backlund and Kulak also home grown, and providing benefit (I know, Brodie is debatable here). Jankowski looks like he will be a good homegrown pick as well. That is 9 by my count. Gio is really homegrown as well, despite not being drafted at all.

First and foremost, no, Giordano does not count and proves the opposite of what you're trying to suggest. Winning a grand slam homerun with Giordano as an unsigned free agent doesn't count as example of Flames drafting. He count as an example of just how terrible this team would be if they could only rely on their drafting. One of the team's best players, maybe THE best, was a stroke of luck unrelated to the draft. Full credit to the player for turning himself into a premiere player in the league, but you don't get to count Giordano unless you're willing to count also losing out Martin St.Louis.

The rest of your list is just a list of players. Every team has players they've drafted on the roster. San Jose drafted Chris Tierney in the second round, 55th overall and he's 14th in his draft class for points. That's the Janko draft, btw.

So, while we're all very excited that the Janko draft pick looks like it might be panning out, Janko has ~200 less career games and ~80 less points. So, ya, really great that Janko is actually a warm enough body he can make the roster, but basically every single team in the league has a player as good or better from that draft in their lineup right now.

We then supplement with trades like Dougie and Hamonic, who were both on decent contracts, and are young, which is wise and beneficial if you think your team is at the right place in its progression. I know this is debatable also, but I really think most expected we would be better this year, and that Hamonic would help that progression. What we did not do, and what would be foolish, would be trading 1st round picks for aging players, in the hopes that would push us over the top.

The Hamilton and Hamonic trades happen as a direct result of the poor drafting by the Flames. They had an established core group of forwards who looked to be the lead horses on the roster, but without any prospects on the horizon of even close to the same tier. This is unsurprising when you look at their draft history. In the 5 drafts between the Backlund draft and the Monahan draft, the Flames drafted 4 times in round 1, only drafting before pick#20 in the Baertschi selection (13th overall). Their highest 2nd rounder in that span was 42nd overall. Of course, the Flames didn't make a 1st or 2nd round selection in 2010 (whoops!). Considering the flames only won a handful of playoff games over that entire stretch, that's really bad. But what's worse is how infrequently they picked defenders. Only 2 picks for defenders in the first 2 rounds over those 5 drafts.

So the Flames had assembled a car with an amazing engine but didn't realize until they were about to start the race that they didn't have any tires. They had to go out and buy them with draft picks. It's hard to understate how significant a setback not having any qualified young defenders in the system until now has had on the ability of this roster to win games while the forward group are in their prime point producing years.

A 15th overall pick has a 41.7% chance of playing 100 NHL games and a 16.7% chance of being a top 6 forward or top 4 defenseman. Dougie was already better than that.

This argument is so tiresome. The value of the draft pick is not measured only in games played, it's measured in the flexibility of assets and in the near immeasurable impact of getting top end players and how they drive an entire franchise's success during their tenure with the team.

Al MacInnis and Mike Vernon have a combined ~2200 games in the NHL. 1st and 3rd rounder.

Dan Quinn, Brian Bradley and Perry Berezan have a combined ~2200 games in the NHL. 1st, 3rd and 3rd rounder.

Which was the better draft? Which was more important to the Flames fielding a cup winner?

This is the most maddening part for me. The Flames are their OWN blueprint for success but refuse to follow it. David Poile is the winningest general manager in league history and he was sitting at that draft table as assistant GM when the Flames made their best draft pick of all time.