So How'd We Do?

wow and then a typo in the first line of the Shoalts re-alignment story. Who’s the weekend web editor at the Globe and Mail? Geez.

He could be a Macarthur-ish player this year, I think. Could probably be had on the cheap but has high upside.

Was he not qualified? I was high on him at the beginning of the year but coaching staffs don’t seem to like him and Burke (for better or worse) seems to be avoiding these types

I guess the question is, is there a smaller gap between the players available at 22 and 30 this year than there have been in previous years? Most observers seem to think so.

I really liked that piece, but I think it also highlights just how weird it is to trade up, then select a guy who doesn’t have a high-end ceiling. We didn’t pick someone who projects to be a Gagne or a Foote, we took someone who projects to be a Wayne Presley.

it was just a shitty selection at 22 overall. You don’t take a guy who racks up huge PIMs with good skating ability but zero offensive numbers 22nd overall. It’s like drafting Wade Belak (1st round 12th overall by the Nordiques in 1994). He may have played in 549 NHL games, but he registered all of 8 goals and 33 points to go along with his 1263 PIMs.

Listening to Nonis’ recent interview on TSN radio, and the reasons he gives for the Liles pickup are pretty much exactly what we were hoping for; he says they’ve got some talented young guys in Gardiner and Blacker waiting in the wings, but they’re not quite ready yet so they wanted a guy who could step in in the meantime.

But on Twitter Gabe Desjardins has been saying that Liles is awful and the Leafs overpaid for him.

For a second round pick, a potential late one? I dunno. Liles doesn’t seem that awful to me.

is really not good in his own end… he drives a reasonable amount of offense, but he is shite in his own end and the Leafs suck defensively… this won’t make the Leafs much better in that regard, particularly if he logs big minutes.

Wilson’s also coached four rebuilding teams. He’s not a coach that seems to get parachuted in to an almost complete team to try to put them over the top but rather that gets in to set the tone for the franchise. I think that with the hiring of Scott Gordon that the Leafs are setting up a situation where Wilson gets canned if the team is struggling early.

That’s the hope.

Backes was a 1.06 ppg player in his two USHL seasons… Biggs is a 0.50 ppg player.

Ryan Malone, and Milan Lucic?

Brown put up 41 goals and 73 points in 63 games in the OHL when he was 17 with Guelph (1.16 ppg)

Lucic put up 9 goals and 19 points in 62 games with Vancovuer in the WHL when he was 17 (0.31 ppg)… at 18 he
suddenly produced 30 goals and 68 points in 70 games though before jumping to the NHL.

Malone put up 14 goals and 36 points in 51 USHL games with the Omaha Lancers when he was 19? (0.71 ppg) He didn’t really break out until his 3rd year of NCAA hockey at St. Cloud State with 24 goals and 49 points in 41 games as a Junior. He was an overage 4th round pick (115th overall) that the Penguins made because his dad was one of their chief scouts.

I’d say of the three, he’s most similar to Lucic in terms of place in his development, I hope to god he doesn’t take another 5 years to reach his “potential” like Malone did before breaking out in college. Lucic would be a nice development model.

I don’t think he’ll ever develop into a Brown, Backes, etc. type 30 goal threat. Lucic’s shooting percentage this year was nice, and I dunno if he’ll maintain it though it’s possible with how he plays. Malone is a 45-50 point guy, and that’d be upper end projection for the likes of Biggs.

Apparently LA was willing to trade for the 7th straight up last night by Edmonton wanted to dump salary.

Kind of amuses me that $800 000 of Colin Fraser is what was holding this trade up

I could go as high as a B- I think.

yeah you think they couldnt come to terms with a second round pick – its a second round pick lets be serious i think col finally said fuck it and took the pick

I get the feeling JML won’t be much of a fan fave come October.

And only 3-5 of them probably will be.

Scouts focus on these kids so there has to be an upside that isn’t based on points. If he’s a big guy that can skate well then he will probably get points or play good shut down minutes and considering the shambles our PK can be, he could be a good fit

no. Schenn was a sure thing. because, you know, there is such a thing as a sure thing pick

it’s that they dislike the pick… there’s a distinction there.

Circular logic. Who are the experts? People who we think know best. Why do we think they know best? Because they’re the experts. The idea that people should never question the decisions of professionals or that we should never have doubts about players on the team is actually really harmful to discourse, and to hockey.

There is a bias going on here, mostly because people tend to take generalities (aka “swing for the fences”) and turn them into black and white truths. We’re also biased because the reports put out by people like Corey Pronman tend to be exactly what we’re looking for: descriptive, in a language we understand, a little vague but generally dealing in absolutes (ie slotting prospects into top-6 bottom-6 roles). In contrast NHL teams never justify their selection process, at least not in ways we find as satisfying.

At the end of all of this we’re simply choosing to throw our opinions behind one group of experts (the online blogging/scouting community) over another (the Leafs scouting staff), for reasons that are entirely sensible but not necessarily right. If we can argue that the Leafs can be wrong then we can argue the same about all the other prospect evaluators out there as well, but because one group is much more communicative the conversation is pretty one-sided.

It’s that, historically, picks in a given range have a certain likelihood of working out. If we know that we have two picks with about the same chances of producing an NHL player, why would we get rid of them for one marginally better chance?

If you have two lottery tickets with a 10% chance of winning, you wouldn’t trade them both in for one lottery ticket that has a 12% chance of winning.

People are getting awfully snarky in here.

I think we should just trust our president GM in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.

People aren’t calling the Biggs pick a failure. The main complaint is that the odds of getting an NHLer at 22, 25, 30, or 39 are roughly the exact same so we traded 2 shots at getting a player for 1. It has less to do with Biggs and any scouting of him than with maximizing the Leafs’ opportunity to get an NHLer out of those picks.

Of course, the hope is that the hockey minds that get paid to fail roughly 80+% of the time have got this choice right and while they gave up two chances for one chance that they made the right gamble.

The fact that Lucic was picked 50th makes me like this pick less.

lol

Lucky for them, they still have Holtby and Neuvirth just in case.