That's the thing, we always think someone's is going to take our guy, even when we are reaching 20-30+ picks for them.
We thought someone was going to take JBD.
We thought Soogard was going in the 1st.
We thought 1 team was going to trade up to steal Pinto.
At some point, you need to stop thinking other teams are going to reach for guys like you, when it seems completely insane they would. Did we really think another team was gong to reach into another hemisphere to take Lodin in the 4th when he likely is on nobodies draft list? Same with Burgess. Reaching is perfectly fine, I have no problems with that. We should know that our list is nowhere near common and we have guys higher Than pretty much anyone. A move back a single spot is very safe, especially when there are 4/5 extremely high profile guys left in the board and you are going to be taking a guy ranked towards the 3rd round. We traded up to 37 using an extra pick to take Soogard. Worst case we take him instead and save our other picks.
They did trade down last year, so you know they consider it an option, and I also think you need to consider the opposite perspective.
When you have guys on the board that you really want, you don’t have to try and play games to see if you can eek out another late round pick. You take the guy you want and move on.
You don’t see a ton of trading back at the draft because most teams would prefer taking their guy than risk losing him for a 6th round flier. Often when they do move back it’s because they don’t have a single guy they really want, and it makes sense to add another pellet to the shotgun blast.
You of all people should know better than to play the ‘reach’ card here. Just because fans who follow consensus scouting services feel that a player was a reach doesn’t not mean that the Sens scouting team thought it was a reach. If they felt that all that was left were reaches, they would have explored trading back, as they did last year, given that they didn’t, clearly they preferred making their picks.
It’s always easy to have strong opinions when you don’t have all of the details, and you have nothing on the line. Mann went through the picks and explained each one, if you disagree with them fair enough, but when your scouting team wants you to take a guy, or to trade up to get a guy, or not trade back to potentially lose a guy, you either listen to them, or you might as well fire the lot of them.