Even if Phillips is too small or not skilled enough or whatever that’s just a symptom of how this team handles prospects. They have shown a historic tendency to bury their picks even their high picks in the AHL and prefer to fill out their bottom six through other means. Usually meh contracts, trading away more picks or just signing an endless stream of has been filler. Other teams around the league however draft players and promote them quick and a lot of them actually become valuable NHL players rather quickly.
So really no matter how you phrase this (Flames don’t draft good enough, they don’t develop good enough, they don’t promote well enough, they don’t value their own picks enough and keep trading it away for filler) the end result is the same. The Flames get very little contribution from their draft compared to other teams. Sutter I think makes this worse with how hard he is on rookies but this I think is more a Trev thing. He’s been trading away 2-4 round picks for years for marginal players and the draft/development he is ultimately responsible for as GM.
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