Quote:
Originally Posted by lanny9
Doesn't happen and is why teams have a draft plan cause they know most kids will take 3-4 years in order to be ready(if they ever are), so going bpa there is foolish and unwise imo.
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The fact that the kids will take 3-4 years to be ready is WHY you draft the BPA. You have no idea what your organizational needs will be four years from now. Nobody does.
Suppose your team has four goalies in the pipeline (not counting the NHL roster): is that enough? Too many? Too few? How many of them will make the NHL? What are the chances of one becoming a regular starter? Impossible to say.
Suppose you have 8 defencemen in the minors and a few more on the reserve list. You have Tim Erixon, a first-round pick. Does that mean you can write his name in the lineup in ink, and cross off ‘second-pairing D’ from your list of needs? Or you have some undrafted plug named Gio-something. Does that mean you have to run right out and use your 1st-round pick on a defenceman, because obviously that is the only way to acquire a first-pairing guy?
Then you get into forwards – and forwards play so many roles on a team that it’s ludicrous even to guess what they will mature into. One guy drafted 20th overall turns into a goal scorer: great. Another guy drafted 20th turns into a mean, tenacious defensive centre, perfect for the third line: also great. You’re not going to complain about either one. But you’re going to have a lot to complain about if you relied on your 20th-overall pick to become a scorer, and he became that checking centre instead.
Meanwhile, your roster is losing players all the time: age, injury, free agency. Sometimes you just have to cut a veteran loose because he’s not worth his salary, or because what he brings is not what the team needs – you already have too many of the same kind of player. (See: Cammalleri, Mike.) You can’t simply assume that all the players over 30 will be gone in four years (some will still be there) and all players under 30 will stay (some will be gone).
You don’t know what your organizational needs will be in four years’ time.
Nobody does.
Planning for the draft is more a matter of deciding what
kind of team you are building, what your organizational philosophy will be; what factor you use as a tiebreaker. There are two players of equal overall talent in the draft: one is a little bigger, the other a little quicker on his feet. It’s a pretty safe bet that L.A. will prefer the bigger one, Detroit will prefer the quicker one: not because they have holes to fill at some particular position, but because of the kind of team each one is.
That’s sound draft planning. It means you take the BPA
according to your standards, and that means you know what qualities you value most, what players need to do to play in your system, and you try not to draft players who will not be able to contribute to that.
If the smaller, faster player is a left wing and the bigger one plays D, and L.A. is short a LW this year, that does not mean that they take the LW and ignore the D who fits better with their philosophy. For them, the D is the BPA, and the LW is the player who fills the organizational need. Only a fool would choose the LW in those circumstances – though fools can sometimes get lucky. He’s not going to play for the team this year; they will have to make a trade or sign a free agent, at which point the positional need has been addressed. What they need to do is go on accumulating assets that they can develop and use. Plugging holes along the way is what free agency and trades are for.
