Panthers have busy draft day

[Caged Great]

With 17 draft picks in the 2009 entry draft, you knew that it was going to be a busy time in Florida. The message that was sent with the selections is that the Panthers are going in a direction where they are going to be big and tough.

In all, the Panthers took 8 Defensemen, 6 right wingers, and one at each of the other positions. Only two of the selections are under 6'0" in Linden Vey and Jordan Szwarz.

GM Matt Duborg feel extremely fortunate that Jared Cowen fell all the way to tenth. Only a couple picks later, he was surprised to see that Zach Kassian was still on board and quickly snapped up the big RWer.

"One of the areas that I saw the Panthers lacking in when I first got hired was their lack of toughness. Going into this draft, I was looking at drafting both for size and for skill. I felt that in certain areas that we had enough depth that we could forego adding players at that position for the time being. Right wing is a big trouble spot in our organization as we only have Chris Stewart right now on our farm team. So, although it wasn't entirely intentional, we did draft to fill the needs as well as getting a lot of prospects that we are happy to have."

"We now believe that we have a lot of the pieces in place now for the Panthers to become even better, and we hope that the addition of Patrick Roy behind the bench will help foster that goal. We still have some minor things to do, like resigning some key free agents and offer contracts to others and to fill out the minor league roster out a bit. Otherwise I think we are pretty much set for the time being."

[Caged Great]

Here's a list of all the players drafted by the panthers today.
Jared Cowan 6-5 216 D
Zach Kassian 6-3 209 RW
Matt Clark 6-3 205 D
Alex Chaisson 6-4 187 RW
Ben Hanowski 6-2 198 RW
Gabriel Lemieux 6-1 170 D
Jesse Blacker 6-1 190 D
Jakob Silfverburg 6-0 183 C
William Wrenn 6-1 185 D
Philip Samuelsson 6-3 198 D
Alex Avtsyn 6-3 198 RW
Linden Vey 5-11 176 RW
Jordan Szwarz 5-10 189 RW
Ben Chiarot 6-2 211 D
Brodie Melnychuk 6-4 186 D
Juraj Holly 6-4" 192 G
Nick Oliver 6-3" 184 LW

[JiriHrdina]

Some nice picks in there -good job.

[Caged Great]

I like Ulf's son Philip Samuelsson. Hopefully he's just as much of a slimy......ahem.

[Da_Chief]

Lotsa picks, I was hoping Cowen would drop couple more spots after he fell out of top 7.

Now comes the tricky part, how you move them around to keep all of them.

[Caged Great]

Originally Posted by Da_Chief

Lotsa picks, I was hoping Cowen would drop couple more spots after he fell out of top 7.

Now comes the tricky part, how you move them around to keep all of them.

Sign any that don't get drafted as fillers for the AHL.

[simmer2]

Nice draft, I had a heck of a time deciding between Cowen and 0EL... I guess it'll be a few years before we know how it turns out. Either way, good job.

[Goffie]

Nice job, you grabbed some nice players there.