Wild 2005 draft evaluation
 

It was almost all misses for the Wild in the 2005 draft.

More...

Thanks Benny for only being an underachiever and letting the subheadline include the word "almost."

Thank you Princess for showing just enough potential so we could get a real player for you.

Other things that I enjoy about the article:
The obligatory mention of the Minnesota-born players one way or another.
The fact that Chuck Fletcher allows his father to be general manager of the Minnesota Wild. Where's Russo with this news?
The fact that the Wild pipeline is so bad that the article admits the number 17 prospect has no shot of making the NHL.
I sort of believe that if you take out the guys who are technically there because there are no other guys, there would be less than twenty prospects. Heck for a team which has a weak goaltender pipeline, there are four of them in the top twenty because there's no one left.

That draft was one big helping of fail.


I do think Bailey could have been a nice bottom-6 guy, but he badly broke his ankle during the WHL playoffs one year, which did him in.

I had a laugh when I read the part about it being "tempting to fault them" for not trading down for the currently underachieving 24th pick the draft. Give me a break.

Kassian in the 2nd round was a horrible pick, why in the world would we take him there?

DR and TT put a premium on big forwards who could skate(See Brent Burns and Colton Gillies as prime examples).

Yeah, but 4 goals in the WHL? Come on.

IIRC, Thompson wanted to protect 'his gem' of a 1st rounder.

Maybe if he wanted to protect his job, he would've done a better job.

Hey that's like 12 goals in the Q.

Whatever you get in other leagues x3 is the formula?

No, that was just me being factitious. However, there actually is a formula that someone made up to compare the three CHL leagues, Europe, USHL and NCAA with one another. I need to try to find that.

That would be very interesting to see. Is the OHL or WHL the cream of the crop for developing prospects? We sure see a lot more NHL prospects go that route.

It's mostly cyclical but given those are where the base of Canada's population and the country churns out over half of all NHLers it's not that big of a surprise those two leagues (along with the Q) would be developing top-tier prospects.

By the way, here's the article:
http://www.behindthenet.ca/projecting_to_nhl.html

Was actually 3 his draft year.
Lucic had 9 his draft year, but Kassian was a better skater, to put things in perspective.

Very interesting article. It was kind of confusing, but it is also a good read. Thanks for that.

Yeah, well we have seen how Kassian compares to Lucic now. :P

Either way, 04/05/06 were pretty bad draft years.

thanks. good article.

kassian correction
 

minor correction.

amateur.

WHL: 17G-20A

pro numbers.

ECHL: 6G-4A
AHL: 3G-6A

obviously.
not a scoring machine.
no pretensions there.

but.
can skate.
and.
definitely a big beating machine. not just with big fists but with big hits.
and.
likely to lay big beatings and big hits on other nhlers in the near future.

why a second round pick?

see the above.
and.
very few young big beating machines in the market.
and.
there doesn't seem to be very many young big beating machines on the horizon either.

I did an in-depth look at the success of the draft post-lockout, and of the junior leagues the OHL had the best likelihood to become a regular NHL'er and the highest points per game. Of all leagues, I think either US high school or US college was the worst. Russians were hit or miss, very high production but very low likelihood to succeed.

Did you run numbers? If so, it'd be interesting to see how the #'s play out.