I always felt like this would be the pick (ideally I would have liked trading down to #7 to add a few assets from Philly, sadly you can't always get what you want because it seems like Arizona was targeting Reinbacher as well) because I think Hughes/Gorton have their own unique vision on how the team should be built.. which basically comes down to great cap management. It could end up being wrong but they don't wanna overpay for forwards, they wanna have a balanced forward and d-core (unlike Toronto for example).
If Reinbacher didn't exist, would they have picked Simachev? Doubt it. Would they have picked Leonard or Dvorsky? Most likely. This type of philosophy might make you miss a few potential homerun players like Michkov (who still have a few question marks, if not they'd be no brainer picks) but you're building a team more so than trying to hit a homerun and then paying said player big $$$ (so there's player risk + cap management risk).
Right now MTL has Dach/Suzuki/Caufield/Slafkovsky, if these 4 players end up becoming who we think they are they'll eat up a lot of cap space but they won't be paid an exorbitant amount of $. We still have Newhook/Beck/Roy/Farrell/Kidney/Mesar (longshot maybe Tuch + Kapenen too) fighting for the remaining top 6 slots (as well as other future prospects/trades/UFA signings etc.). And then we have Guhle/Xhekaj/Mailloux/Hutson/Reinbacher/Harris/Engstrom/Kovacevic/Matheson (a few of them might get moved to upgrade the d-core) on D, that's an insanely talented young core of forwards and dmen already.
Once that core is ready to go all that's left is to figure who the complementary pieces are + having a legit goalie, basically their vision is to build an extremely strong core and spread the money out. Will it end up working? Only time will tell, personally i like the pick even tho we couldn't "maximize" our value for #5 with Michkov on the board, I think in the long run we'll still end up being a stronger team.
