This is the way I look at the Flames entering this past season:
Flames are a good team because they have a lot of good players. They are not a great team because they are missing great players at key positions.
They need to come out of this with BETTER players at key positions, rather than become a younger version of what this team is right now.
Also, in no way is the draft a crapshoot. There are outliers, and there will always be outliers because there is so much else that goes into development, but this is an 18 year old draft. If it was a 20 year old draft, there would be less outliers, but outliers will still exist. Maybe I am misinterpreting the definition of crapshoot, but one only needs to look through the drafts for about 1 min to realize that good players end up getting drafted higher in the draft, and the lower you go the less of those there are, but the more busts and tweeners are found. You can't point to the outliers and proclaim that the draft is a crapshoot if you are being intentionally blind to the incredibly strong correlation that you see in every single draft going back decades and decades.
Some teams make it more of a crapshoot (like Edmonton, especially going back a few years) because those teams are just terrible at drafting. Some teams are really good at drafting. It doesn't mean that you hit on all your picks, but good teams are hitting on more picks more often than bad teams are, and this is fairly consistent year over year. Regime changes tend to upset that consistency somewhat, as new GMs like to bring in their own trusted scouts and so on. Calgary has had a relatively easy time at this as they have normally hired first time GMs, so Calgary hasn't seen as sudden of a change. For instance, the Oilers went out and fired a large portion of their scouting department that one year, and it looks like it started paying off (they have been drafting better of late, but let's see what happens over a longer time-frame).
At any rate, hopefully Calgary can find top-end players at key positions over the next few drafts. That's going to be the most critical aspect of whether or not this rebuild is successful or not. I trust Conroy not to artificially try and accelerate things like Treliving tried to do (picks for Hamilton which were good value, but an accelerated move, picks for Hamonic which were awful value, and constant trading of picks to fill holes or create depth, which then ends up creating depth issues down the road).
Flames are a good team right now with a lot of good players. They did a massive sell-off, and they are still competing with most teams. That speaks volumes to how deep this team is. It just doesn't have that elite top-end, and this hurts this team win enough to go on a run. That's the challenge here, and the the challenge is finding enough of these in the next few drafts, as there is no way the Flames are likely to be bad enough to continue picking that low without Conroy making purposeful moves to tank (which he won't).
TLDR;
Find the good players in the next few drafts Conroy, and get us a cup!
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