I'm getting old so I don't remember everything I said about Strome, but I clearly wanted him at 3OA because, after talking to a couple of Canadian friends of mine, I bought into the fact that he was a neo-Joe Thornton type and that his hockey IQ was next-level. These guys had watched Strome in juniors and, like many fans who pretend to be scouts, were projecting the hell out of the kid. "Smartest player in the Draft," they'd say, and more than a few scout rankings I read prior to the Draft agreed.
Because I didn't actually watch him play, I didn't see his slow foot speed or understand that he was brilliant at a slower game - all I saw were his gaudy stats, and I was in love with the idea of someone on the Coyotes who could think as well as play the game.
So I was one of the few around here happy that we drafted him at 3OA. Turns out I was extremely wrong. Which is fine, I've developed a taste for crow.
This Draft, I started off wanting Nemec or Jiricek because our defensive prospects are, to put it mildly, underwhelming. And if we were thinking of trading Chychrun, I thought we needed a star defenseman in the pipeline to replace him. But then I saw some of Cooley's game film, and read some scouting reports on him, and picked up on the consensus here, and I changed my tune. When it came down to brass tacks, the feeling I got from the consensus on Wright was that he was a star player with some legitimate question marks, and Cooley, while not up to the same star-player level, did not have those question marks. That's what swayed me on the pick.
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