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Originally Posted by SingnBluesOnBroadway
It comes down to talent evaluation. And they have gotten shockingly little production from their first round picks.
I don't care if Korpikoski never played for the Yotes or went on to be a perennial 40 goal scorer — he's not producing for the Rangers and neither is the guy they traded him for.
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But that has nothing to do with their drafting acumen. You lumped him in with a bunch of people who were flat out bad picks. You can't slag the pick just because they didn't keep him.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SingnBluesOnBroadway
The 2004 draft might have turned out to be bad, but again, what value did they get from Montoya — either playing for them or from the trade.
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Context matters. The Jessiman pick wasn't just bad because he busted, it was bad because it seems to have been the only possible way to screw up that pick. The Montoya pick was really a no-win situation. Unless you were expecting them to magically go way off the board to find Stafford or Radulov, it's really hard to fault with them there. It was a ****** year to have a high pick, unless you had the one of the top two.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SingnBluesOnBroadway
Again, iIt comes down to talent evaluation. The fact is, they used a second round pick on a guy who is not even playing hockey anymore. The rest is periphery.
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Everybody blows a pick here or there though. Again, context matters. The Rangers' success rate with second round picks lately is way, way, way above average. Faulting them for not having success 100 percent of the time is silly.
You seem to go out of your way to criticize their first round drafting as a whole. Fine. That's looking at the big picture. That's looking at a trend. We can disagree on the degree of that, but the debate isn't overly reliant on a single data point. But to then turn around and single out the Lafleur selection is beyond picky. We probably have more of our own second round or later picks on our roster than anyone else does:
Dubinsky, Callahan, Sauer, Anisimov, Hagelin, and Stepan. Say what you want about the Lundqvist pick and the luck involved. Even without that pick, we've got as impressive a group of post-first round picks as you'll find outside of Detroit (and none of Lidstrom, Holmstrom, Datsyuk, and Zetterberg were drafted in the last decade+).