Mark Yannetti, on when the decision to select Arthur Kaliyev was made:
I can tell you we had two guys – you’re going to need 20 minutes for me to talk. We were confident, and when I say ‘confident,’ I mean we’re not just flipping the coin and rolling the dice. Confident doesn’t mean ‘100%.’ It just means we thought there was a better-than-average chance that two guys would fall to 33, and he was a guy that we thought might fall, and like I said, if anyone wants to talk to me for a long time, it played into the Bjornfot thing. Both guys were there at 33, both guys we thought would fall there. [Reporter: Is there a five-minute version?] Yeah, I guess so. So, it’s draft strategy, right? The problem is I don’t think I can do it in five minutes because I’m one of the most verbose human beings on the planet. That’s Dean’s fault, by the way. Blame Dean for me being like this. So, what happens is you look at 22, and we had a dead heat at 22. So, you have a D and a forward that happen to be our dead heat. And then you look at the draft, and if you look at our list – not any independent list – between 22 and 32, we would’ve had two defensemen left on our list, and then between 22 and 33, we had two defensemen but we had four forwards. I know it doesn’t make sense – that’s why it’s the short version. So, the odds of there being a defenseman there at 33 were less than half of what it was with there being a forward. That’s just your numbers. Now, you look at all the independent lists, and we identified two of those forwards we thought would be the ones to fall, so now it checks another box in terms of what may be there. So, what we did is we took a slight calculation of risking maybe losing the forward because if we lose those guys, the difference in depth between the four guys that we lose and the ones that would be available at 33 was much less than what you’d lose between a defenseman. So, if the two defensemen are on a scale of 1-100, the difference is 70. If the forwards go, the next forward, it’s like 20. So we kind of took a calculated risk saying that we wouldn’t get defensive value at 33, but we could still get forward value if our list went wrong. … I can’t tell you how stressful it was watching 27, 28, 29, and then once it got to 31, then we knew we’d get one of the two, and we’re like, ‘oh yeah, we’re geniuses.’ And I’m sitting there the whole time, like, ‘don’t [go poorly].’ I’m telling Rob this is a probability, and if a probability doesn’t happen, then I’d look like an idiot.