Quote:
Originally Posted by Hackey
No one has reproduced their drafting and probably no one ever will. The odds of finding Zetterberg and Datsyuk in the 7th and 6th round in back to back years is probably 1 in 10 million.
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The odds improve dramatically when you're actually scouting Europe properly and other teams aren't.
Since the first days of professional hockey, there have been teams that went cheap on scouting to pay players more, and teams that went cheap on players to do more scouting. The latter
always outperform the former in the long run.
In the big salary inflation of the 1990s, a lot of smaller-market teams cut back their scouting and development budgets and spent that money trying to keep up with escalating player salaries. The Flames were one of those teams. By the time of the lockout, they had only a handful of scouts and only a shared AHL team. Any team that prioritized scouting and development had an easy advantage in that environment.