His philosophy is what, don’t gamble to improve in trade? Gamble to improve only at the draft? It’s a bullshit philosophy right now.
That's the aspect I question.
It's an imperfect metaphor, but for simplicity let's say that each draft pick is a coin flip (heads means it provides equal or better than average production from that draft slot...tails means anything less).
So you want to flip as many coins as possible, explicitly because it's roughly a 50/50 chance that each one works in your favor. Let's say that you do what you can to gather 20 coin flips. So it would be statistically reasonable to say that somewhere around 10 flips will be heads, and you determine a variation of 2, meaning that with those 20 flips, anything between 8 heads and 12 heads would not be unexpected.
It's one thing to make a plan with the expectation of 12 heads, being towards the optimistic end of the statistical spectrum. It's another to make a plan with the expectation of 16 heads out of 20. Considering the variation of 2, you're essentially saying, "Between my amateur scouting, draft strategy, and development resources, I EXPECT Detroit to be about TWICE as good as the average NHL team for building a team from the draft."
Which is not eliminating risk. It's just exchanging one type of risk for another.
I'm very encouraged by the majority of high draft picks they've made. But that's not the same thing as DEPENDING on Cossa and ASP and Danielson to ALL pan out into very good players (and, depending on how much longer he's using this approach, also depending on Buchelnikov, MBN, their early picks in 2025, in 2026, etc.).
