Confirmed with Link: Avs Sign Oskar Olausson to ELC

[Ceremony]

The "we're shit at drafting" bit is much funnier if you just look at players who went a pick or two after us: Which draft pick(s) cost your team a Cup or Cups plural?

1998: Ramzi Abid drafted 28th overall. Jonathan Cheechoo drafted 29th overall. Cheechoo isn't going to make the difference to the mid-00s Avalanche but Forsberg setting him up in 03-04 could have been something.
1999: Mikhail Kuleshov drafted 25th overall. Martin Havlat drafted 26th overall. Havlat could certainly have helped in 02, 03 and 04.
1999: Branko Radivojevic drafted 93rd overall. Chris Kelly drafted 94th overall. I didn't know we drafted him. Judging by Wikipedia we just didn't sign him. By the time Kelly breaks into the league post-lockout he's not going to change anything but it would still have been nice.
2002: Eric Lundberg drafted 94th overall. Valtteri Fiilppula drafted 95th overall. He's not making a difference to any Avalanche team over his career but I have to say I'm finding out about a lot more of these than I realised or was expecting.
2003: David Liffiton 63rd overall. Jimmy Howard 64th overall. If we have Howard maybe we don't trade for Varlamov in 2011 with the pick that became Filip Forsberg. He could be on the team and making a difference even now.
2003: Linus Videll 204th overall. Joe Pavelski 205th overall. Oh f*** off.
2005: Ryan Stoa 34th overall. Marc-Edouard Vlasic 35th overall. Judging from Vlasic's contract I doubt he would have helped much during the current era of contention but Ryan Stoa was fat and useless.
2008: Cameron Gaunce 50th overall. Derek Stepan 51st overall. Another who had maybe tailed off by the time the 2020s came but a few veterans were rejuvenated in 2022.
2012: Joseph Blandisi 162nd overall. Linus Ullmark 163rd overall. Hey how's the Avalanche goaltending been the past five years? Do we need him?
2013: Nathan MacKinnon 1st overall. I wanted Seth Jones because we already had Duchene, O'Reilly and Stastny. Whoops.
2014: Conner Bleackley 23rd overall. Fat. David Pastrnak 25th overall. Quite good.
2014: Nick Magyar 93rd overall. Ville Husso 94th overall. Husso came in when Binnington got injured in 2022. Maybe we would have beat Saint Louis in 5 games rather than 6.
2014: Julien Nantel 204th overall. Ondrej Kase 205th overall. Could've been useful in 2021 rather than the corpse of Carl Soderberg.
2015: JC Beaudin 71st overall. Anthony Cirelli 72nd overall. Maybe our middle six centres wouldn't have been so diabolical the past two seasons.
2016: Nate Clurman 161st overall. Jesper Bratt 162nd overall. Hey scoring depth is useful isn't it.
2018: Brandon Saigeon 140th overall. Yegor Sharangovich 141st overall. I feel like I'm in f***ing Saigon going through these.
2019: Bowen Byram 4th overall. Alex Turcotte 5th overall. What a diddy Turcotte turned out to be.
2020: Justin Barron 25th overall. Jake Neighbours 26th overall. Because we have lots of defensive prospects and a stacked blueline we can trade Barron for Lehkonen who scores a conference and Stanley Cup final winning goal. Barron looks to have no future in the league just two years later.

And then players we missed out on by one pick:

1996: Peter Ratchuk 25th overall. Daniel Briere 24th overall. Quality.
1996: Justin Clark 240th overall. Sami Salo 239th overall. I'm sure you can't really rue things that happened in rounds that don't exist anymore but a player would be nice.
1997: Kevin Grimes 26th overall. Brenden Morrow 25th overall. That's two for two in the first round so far.
1998: Ramzi Abid 28th overall. Scott Gomez 27th overall. Straddling the 1st/2nd rounds, but the streak is alive! In a non-salary cap world, do these first four picks make the Avalanche the team to beat from 2000-2004?
1999: Martin Grenier 45th overall. Jordan Leopold 44th overall. If we drafted him maybe we could have got a better return when we traded Tanguay.
2000: Vaclav Nederost 14th overall. Ron Hainsey 13th overall. He would certainly have been a Guy during the barren years.
2000: Jared Aulin 47th overall. Jarret Stoll 46th overall. Stoll might have mitigated the loss of Forsberg post-lockout.
2000: Agris Saviels 63rd overall. Paul Martin 62nd overall. A fine second pairing partner for Ron Hainsey. They could have had 1500 games between them and nobody would know.
2000: Brian Fahey 119th overall. Lubomir Visnovsky 118th overall. We're going to get a whole d-corps of Guys here aren't we?
2000: Aaron Molnar 221st overall. Paul Gaustad 220th overall. A lesser version of Stoll insulating the bottom six in Sakic's last years?
2003: Dave Liffiton 63rd overall. The man followed up by Jimmy Howard was preceded by David Backes at 62. Very glad we didn't get him.
2004: Denis Parshin 72nd overall. Andrej Sekera 71st overall. There's our fourth Guy on the backend, but we couldn't lose the king of the draft memes.
2004: Ian Keserich 215th overall. Troy Brouwer 214th overall. Also one pick before Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond, and who wouldn't want to have drafted a guy with that name?
2005: Ryan Stoa 34th overall. James Neal 33rd overall. Our second sandwich of the list. Imagine his kneeing prowess vs. Matt Cooke in 2014.
2005: Chris Durand 52nd overall. Mason Raymond 51st overall. Again, 2014 might have been a bit better.
2006: Nigel Williams 51st overall. Milan Lucic 50th overall. Gee he would've been nice.
2007: Kent Patterson 113th overall. Colton Sceviour 112nd overall. Respectability by the start of the Bednar era? I'm not sure.
2008: Mark Olver 140th overall. Mark Borowiecki 139th overall. I enjoyed Wolverine but we're up to five D!
2010: Joey Hishon 17th overall. Vladimir Tarasenko 16th overall. You can't legislate for injuries and I'm just glad Hishon made it to the NHL. There's no chance we could have afforded him by this point but he had a career year in 2022.
2011: Duncan Siemens 11th overall. Jonas Brodin 10th overall. I love Duncan but there's the final piece of the defensive puzzle. A top six made of second pairing guys. The dream. I don't think he can skate well enough to keep up in the 2020-onward Avalanche and he probably precludes Toews Byram Manson actually never mind this one the Wild can keep him.
2016: Tyson Jost 10th overall. Mikhail Sergachev 9th overall. Jost is a waste of space. Montreal trading Sergachev was funny.
2016: Cameron Morrison 40th overall. Alex DeBrincat 39th overall. Goals! They're always good.

 

[Pokecheque]

Ha...Kuleshov, the player (along with possibly Vaclav Nederost and Josef Marha) that pretty much made Pierre Lacroix a full-blown Europhobe for the remainder of his time with the Avs.