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The Mother-fucking goddamn Off-season Thread

MindzEye said:
Is it though?

It hasn't been bad...but I don't know if I would characterize it as so good that I'm worried about losing it

2015: If you want to give credit for Marner, sure. I think Hunter deserves a lot of the Marner credit personally. After that though, the trade down out of the Konecny spot has aged poorly (Dermott + Bracco) despite it being the value play...especially when you see Aho drafted immediately after Dermott, Carlo & Cernak shortly after that. Timashov is the only other guy who got any NHL games from that draft year. Basically, we generated minimal value outside of the #4 overall pick...fuck, I've been making fun of the Oilers for that kind of drafting for over a decade.

2016: Matthews was a no brainer. After that though, Korschov was a pretty significant swing and miss on a weirdo off the board overage Russian prospect when Kyrou, Debrincat, Girard, Hart, Lindgren, Hronek and a handful of other less good but useful players were on the board and taken shortly after. Grundstrom helps salvage this draft, but he's a 4th liner...not great value with a 2nd rounder, but not turrible. At least we got decent value for him in trade. Woll might salvage this draft because goalies are weird but that's probably what the rest of this draft hinges on imo. If he flops, this is a bit of a bust of a draft for me

2017: Widely regarded as Hunter's draft. Lilly at the 17 is nice value despite our coach, you know, not playing him and shit. The rest of the draft is pure garbage. Every other prospect was DOA within like, 12 months.

2018: Okay, this is much better. Sandin at the 28 is a really good pick, regardless of us fucking him about and eventually trading him for 50 cents on the dollar. Durzi is great value out of the 2nd round. Holmberg sure looks like a real NHL body out of the 6th round. This is the kind of results that I would be concerned about losing, but we've only seen it in 1 of 4 years to this point.

2019: Robertson I still love as a draft pick and was a spectacular get in the 2nd round. Type of prospect that changes how your development system looks really quickly...but yeah, stop dying on the ice kid. Abruzz is making enough noise in the AHL that maybe there is something there, but I'm a hard meh on him.

20-22: I like a lot of these prospects. Knies obviously looks like fantastic value in the 2nd round. I'm still very high on Niemela (moreso since he's transitioned pretty seemlessly to the AHL at the end of this year...looks very good) with a bunch more that I like quite a bit (Minten, Voit, Villeneuve, Hildeby, Moldy). It seems like he's done well considering the 1sts he's traded (also Amirov...hard to scout for cancer ffs). But I don't know if I would call this irreplaceable at all.

Overall, we just haven't received a lot of value from the draft outside of our high 1sts. Some of that is the organization scoring own goals with Lilly & Sandin. Some of it is them swinging and missing hard trying to be the smartest organization in the room (remember the Korschkov draft where we were assured that the overage picks were undervalued?lol)
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wasn't 2018 Dubie's first draft in charge?
 
Wayward DP said:
I mean Korshkov screams Hunter. Can't see Dubie ever wanting him at that draft position.
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Eh, it was dubas at the time talking about overage picks being the hidden value in the draft, etc.

I'm not saying he's done poorly at the draft table, I just don't see draft savant omg what are we going to do without him results
 
zeke said:
as a rule i never get attached to GMs and coaches. they're not rare like elite athletic talent is rare. there's a shit tonne of people who can do those jobs well.

i generally trust the way MLSE operates nowadays and doubt that they would go backwards to an old school way of doing things. I'd actually wager they'd come up with someone even more committed to and/or experienced in analytics.
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Got to chat with a high up nerd in another organization a few days ago and we got to talking about coaches and their penchant to line mixing, sticking to hard matchups and leaning on gudpros despite it going against the data they work on

Our GM has a philosophy that when you hire someone, you leave them to do their job and most coaches operate that way with their assistants too. Its very frustrating at times as no coach can be told a damn thing. You need to have huge confidence and control issues to be an NHL coach so you just have to slowly grind away at them and hope they eventually start to believe its their own idea . We will present our numbers to both GM and coach but they ultimately let the coach make the final call as he is the one who will get fired if things go wrong
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So the tail wags the dog.

What a broken ass model to run your organization with. We're going to spend millions, hire specialists to produce massive amounts of useful data to make decisions with, spend more millions to pay hockey execs to interpret and make multi million dollar roster decisions with...but then let some former 13th forward piss on it all and light it on fire the day after we hire him because he has all the knowledge he needs from blocking a shot with his face in the playoffs once or twice.
 
Just since 2018 the Leafs have drafted 2 top 4 dmen (Sandin/Durzi), a top 6 winger (Knies), a 4th line center (Holmberg), all basically outside of the first round (Sandin 29th).

Plus a handful of legit prospects like Robertson, Hirvonen, Niemela, Minten, Tverberg, Voit, Moldenhaur, Villeneuve.

I am sure some teams have drafted better over that time, but its a pretty job. Particularly considering he only had 2 firsts and one of them has had to temporarily retire due to health.
 
imo, the drafting/development/identifying guys out of the echl/lower tiers has been excellent but that's only one part of the job.

so you can give him credit, think our pool is good/will pay dividends the next few years and still be ok with moving on.
 
hockeylover said:
so you can give him credit, think our pool is good/will pay dividends the next few years and still be ok with moving on.
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Yep.

All I'm saying is that it hasn't been so good that it makes me think twice about moving on from him.

It's been good. I'm happy with our drafting. But it's not like Masai's or anything

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*note that the 2nd best drafting club is also largely's Masai's work too*
 
They were coGMs in 2015. But Hunter obviously was in charge of the scouting department and also coGM.

What a bad draft. Aho was the next pick after Dermott followed by Seigenthaller, Dunn, Cernak, Carlo, Hintz, Andersson and Kylington. And they had 3 picks in the 60's and Cirelli went 72.
 
zeke said:
but i think he was actually co-gm for some of those earlier pre-lou drafts.
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Just the 2015 draft. He and Hunter were co-GM’s for that one, and that draft does seem to have a bit of Dubas flavour.

2016 & 2017 were all Lou & Hunter, and then 2018 onwards has been Dubas’s show.
 
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