Quote:
Originally Posted by Monahammer
This is terrible asset management and locked in positional thinking. Instead, they should take the better player and not be afraid to then leverage the enhanced value that player creates through a trade later on.
Stromgren example is perfect. Stromgren is pretty much useless at this point. No growth curve is going to take him to the NHL in a reasonable time frame at this point. His value in a trade is probably nil. Stankoven just won CHL player of the year. He could no doubt be traded to fill a hole somewhere else on the roster.
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I completely agree with you and I fully advocate for drafting BPA in every single round, but the thing is BPA is an incredibly difficult thing to pin down, especially in later rounds. And when there are two players that are roughly ranked the same, they will draft based on need.
Teams have "tier" lists, and the further down the draft, the bigger the tier groupings, and within those tiers, they draft based on need.
Extremely probable that we had Stromgren in the same tier or even a higher tier as Stankoven, for example, and we drafted the type of player we didn't have a lot of in our system.
It's also why we took a guy like Wotherspoon instead of Kucherov. If I recall correctly, we took Marcus Granlund first, and then Wotherspoon, even though we had interest in Kucherov. Granlund and Kucherov were similar style players in their draft. We most likely had Granlund in a higher tier than Kucherov. Wotherspoon might have been in the same tier as Kucherov, or maybe Kucherov was in an even lower tier, and so we drafted the defenseman instead of another smallish forward after we already took Baertschi and Granlund.
It's not necessarily bad drafting. It's just that it's incredibly difficult to say for certain that one player is definitely a tier above another, especially after the first 15 picks or so, and without the benefit of hindsight.