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2025 Canes Entry Draft Thread

If it worked for the front office and scouts, then that really should be the focus. But darn, that was boring TV.
 
I was only really interested to see the point where the facts of the draft pool kicked in*, so I wasn't glued to the whole thing ... thank God. What bits of the broadcast I did watch were honestly embarrassing. ESPN didn't bother to prep much as far as I could tell, figuring that they could charm their way through a tedious 5 hour broadcast for some reason. Here's the thing, Bristol. As always, you vastly over-estimate your charm level. If you want out of your NHL contract just say so. Some of that was on the format, which was pretty clearly not well thought out, but the stuff I saw would have been terrible regardless.

* about pick 12, by my reckoning. That was when it dawned that, oh ... everybody left is a second round talent in a normal year. At that point, who cares about rankings and draft grades? Line up the player profile you like and let rip. The only losers at that point were the sucker teams who thought they needed to trade to move up. My dudes, nobody wanted your guy. Especially when that guy is a HS quarterback, Chicago. Thanks for the TWO 2nd rounders, but what the hell?
 
Oh, speaking of warnings ... there's more than a few under-valued Russians on the draft board starting Round 2.
 
Maybe they should have the first day be a 10 player draft and then let the rest be be drafted the day after.
 
On the broadcast, I think they just had a complete disconnect and never accounted for how fundamentally different the broadcast would need to be with the teams being remote. Here's a thought, off the top of my head ... watch your own NFL Draft broadcast for clues. Of course, that would require the NHL actually having the ability to be embarrassed by their own TV product, and that evidence doesn't yet exist.
 
I think the reason why I rarely watch the draft is that--while I think some skill goes into the selection process--so much of it is a crapshoot. This morning, I was playing around with ChatGPT looking at players from the last 30 years who were late round picks who ended up being massive superstars. Among the names on that list are Doug Gilmour (7th round pick, 1474 GP, 1414 points), Luc Robitaille (9th round pick, 1431 GP, 1394 points), Brett Hull (6th round pick, 1269 GP, 1391 points), Bernie Nicholls (4th round pick, 1127 GP, 1209 points), Henrik Zetterberg (7th round pick, 1232 GP, 960 points), and Pavel Datsyuk (6th round pick, 953 GP, 918 points). That list doesn't include guys who were undrafted who had big careeres like Dino Ciccarelli and Martin St. Louis or undraft goalies like Ed Belfour or Sergei Bobrovsky.
 
Speaking of under-valued Russians ...

As far as I could tell, there were two goalies in this draft that weren't absolute crapshoots and San Jose took one of them yesterday. Carolina got the other one after trading down twice. I'm not dead sure, but I suspect that San Jose could have gotten Ravensbergen 6-8 slots lower as well, had they chosen to trade down. When there's like 50 guys in the draft pool with 2nd round grades, trading down multiple times just makes sense.
 
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