Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylvanfan
The Flames have just sucked at drafting centers. It's not like every center in the NHL was a first round pick and a top 6 one. Outside of Jankowski, Monahan, Bennett, Zary, and Backlund who have the Flames drafted in the last 20 years who's played 200 games in the NHL at that position?
Yeah top 2...not top 5...top 2 is usually needed to get an elite one. But eff me in 20 years you couldn't draft one in round 3 that could play 3 seasons as a 4th liner?
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possibly fair. I can't tell how their batting average in that regard compares to other teams. if you look at their ihdb draft page, there are several Center-ish or Center- adjacent picks (presumably part of that large group that always exists that played C either entirely or partially in Jr but were never destined to be NHL Cs- Dube, Granlund, Pospisil, Ruzicka and Kerins I suppose all listed as Cs- probably 3 of the 5 will hit 200 games
then there are the misses but I would guess most teams would have a list like this (and a few have asterisks of different types attached to them) Armstrong, Marvin, Carpentier (ok Flames were at a low point in drafting circa 2006 not gonna lie), Renaud (*), Nemisz (ugh), Grantham, Reinhart, Arnold, Lindstrom, Mattson, Joly, Roman, Petterson, Nikolaev, Francis, Ronni (*/ugh), Littler, Lipinski
ok that's an ugly lineup but less of them as time goes on and most of them are from the late round dregs
other than Ronni they haven't 'missed' (<200g) on a first or 2nd round C since Nemisz. they just haven't drafted enough of them, or drafted high enough. IMO anyways