Isn't a Ayers the emergency goalie who beat Toronto earlier this season?
No it's Ayres but yeah I finally figured out, just never considered a 42 y/o amateur goalie lol.
Yep, exactly. People have a tendency to view the 1st OA as a franchise defining talent and everything else to be leftover scraps.
You need only look at many recent drafts to see that often times the 1st OA player is not the top player in the draft 5 years later.
I wouldn't bet against Lafreniere, but let's say he becomes a Taylor Hall clone, and Byfield/Stutzle hit their ceilings...we'd make out pretty well with one of those two.
Absolutely, I was thinking about this recently. Since the Crosby draft :
Years the 1st OA was the best player : 2005 (Crosby), 2007 (Kane), 2009 (Tavares), 2013 (MacKinnon), 2015 (McDavid), 2016 (Matthews),
Years the 1st OA was not : 2006 (E. Johnson vs Backstrom, Kessel, Toews, Giroux, Marchand), 2010 (Hall vs Seguin, Stone, Kuznetsov, Tarasenko), 2011 (RNH vs Kucherov, Huberdeau, Schefeile, Zibanejad, Gaudreau), 2012 (Yakupov), 2014 (Ekblad vs Draisaitl, Pastrnak, Point), 2017 (Hischier vs Pettersson, Heiskanen, Makar)
Debatable : 2008 (Stamkos vs Karlsson, vs Doughty vs Carlson), 2018 (Svechnikov vs Dahlin vs Hughes)
Of course, the higher you pick, the higher chance you have to get an elite player but they can be anywhere in the draft. If we work some magic, we could have 2 of the best players in the draft thanks to picking that high twice.
Yes but it was still only 25% or 1 in 4. Would have been great to win but I console myself in the fact that virtually no one expected the 3rd overall pick to be the one the Sens got from San Jose. I thought that pick would be in the 20-25 range.
I didn't expect them to be outright bad but I talked about a SJ decline prior to the season when people were saying how "Crappy" the Karlsson return was. Pavelski gone and an aging core, plus EK injuries... there were signs but even then it ended up much better than expected for us. A 3rd OA in this draft is pure gold.