Love Yanetti.
"Everybody wants to sound really smart. Everybody wants to sound like they’ve reinvented the wheel and they’ve discovered something that no one’s ever thought of. Like, the ‘New NHL.’ It’s so cyclical. It’s like every three-to-five years there’s a new NHL. Everybody spent time trying to be the Detroit Red Wings. Everybody spent time trying to be the New Jersey Devils. Then everybody spent time trying to be the LA Kings. Now everybody’s spending time trying to be Chicago, Pittsburgh. Again, it’s not that anything’s created different. You’ve always wanted that speed, you’ve always wanted that skill. So, when we go in and look, speed jumps of the page. You walk into a rink in warm-up and the first thing you notice is if a guy’s big, or if a guy’s fast. It’s just obvious. You see a guy who’s 6-foot-5, you don’t need to scout it. You know he’s big. You can almost look in the program, and then you see a guy flying around the rink in warm-up, flying around the rink the very first shift of the game, you know he’s fast. I think those traits are pretty obvious, and I think they’ve been obvious … I don’t think you have to be a scout to tell me who’s fast."
Edit: From same question, haha. Love how he illustrates this point re: Vilardi.
"More would come down to in certain areas, you might go for a faster player over this player. Player A is faster than Player B. But again, as you saw last year, the focus with speed, I don’t see an issue with Gabe Vilardi’s skating. He’s certainly not on the rocket ship side of the spectrum, but if it was ‘speed,’ there were four or five guys drafted behind him that are faster. But, as you saw during this year, there wasn’t a better player in junior hockey when he came back. So, you wouldn’t sacrifice a clear level of player just to get speed. You wouldn’t sacrifice a clear level of player just to get skill. Now, if you had Gabe and Elias Pettersson, now have an argument. You’ve got a fast guy. I won’t tell you who was ahead because it’s not fair to say who we had ahead on the draft board, but now you’re comparing two elite players, and one has an attribute you’re looking at and one doesn’t. That might come into play."
Also great stuff in there re: Clifford, why he was drafted, why they love him.
