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Confirmed with Link: Ducks sign Tim Washe to ELC (1 year, $975k)

Mr Rogers said:
No outrage, I’m just not impressed with our forward drafting outside of slam dunk picks. Really going back to about 2016 (mostly because the guys we actually drafted vs who we could’ve).

I’m not saying it’s awful by any means, but I’m not impressed by it. And unearthing just 1 or two more forwards later in the draft since that time would’ve helped the team’s depth a lot.

Maybe that will change with Pasta, Sidorov etc, but too early to say.
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Well there was a stretch when we did get legit NHL forwards at a high rate. Rakell, Palmieri, DSP, Karlsson, Kase, Terry, Steel ... all that in 8 drafts. That is WAY above the normal hit rate.

But yes, that well dried up for about 3 years, and that's hurt, but I don't think if we'd found 1 additional guy even of Terry's caliber that it would have drastically changed things.

Anything after that is just starting to trickle in (Colangelo the first of that next group). But that said, it could just be the law of averages. A 3 year series of misses really isn't much statistically. Individual drafts are miniscule sample sizes ... a 3 year period without a useful forward is to be expected from time to time no matter how good you are at drafting.

Objectively, I don't think you'll find many teams who were finding 7 NHL forwards in 8 years in the late 1st and beyond. And I'd also be careful of labeling high draft choices as "slam dunk picks." Plenty of teams whiff near the top of the draft, yet thus far it appears the only potential full on bust we have among our recent high picks is the one we traded for Gauthier. Top 10 picks usually fail at a much higher rate than 1 out of 6. Just consider, Ryan Strome was a top 5 pick, and he's actually a decent outcome for his draft position.

The biggest reason for our decline isn't the inability to draft well at a particular position ... it's that we didn't unearth any core star-level forwards for a long time after 2003. But to get a superstar forward even with high picks takes a lot of fortune; you can pick 2nd overall in a year where it's Kakko or Legwand, or you can pick 2nd in a year where it's Malkin or Eichel. To get a star forward outside of the top of the draft is mostly dumb luck ... no way the Bruins were expecting Pastrnak to be what he was.
 
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FiveTacos said:
Well there was a stretch when we did get legit NHL forwards at a high rate. Rakell, Palmieri, DSP, Karlsson, Kase, Terry, Steel ... all that in 8 drafts. That is WAY above the normal hit rate.

But yes, that well dried up for about 3 years, and that's hurt, but I don't think if we'd found 1 additional guy even of Terry's caliber that it would have drastically changed things.

Anything after that is just starting to trickle in (Colangelo the first of that next group). But that said, it could just be the law of averages. A 3 year series of misses really isn't much statistically. Individual drafts are miniscule sample sizes ... a 3 year period without a useful forward is to be expected from time to time no matter how good you are at drafting.

Objectively, I don't think you'll find many teams who were finding 7 NHL forwards in 8 years in the late 1st and beyond. And I'd also be careful of labeling high draft choices as "slam dunk picks." Plenty of teams whiff near the top of the draft, yet thus far it appears the only potential full on bust we have among our recent high picks is the one we traded for Gauthier. Top 10 picks usually fail at a much higher rate than 1 out of 6. Just consider, Ryan Strome was a top 5 pick, and he's actually a decent outcome for his draft position.

The biggest reason for our decline isn't the inability to draft well at a particular position ... it's that we didn't unearth any core star-level forwards for a long time after 2003. But to get a superstar forward even with high picks takes a lot of fortune; you can pick 2nd overall in a year where it's Kakko or Legwand, or you can pick 2nd in a year where it's Malkin or Eichel. To get a star forward outside of the top of the draft is mostly dumb luck ... no way the Bruins were expecting Pastrnak to be what he was.
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I'm not complaining about not having found any star forwards after 2003 because the team was good for a long time. All i'm literally saying is that we haven't drafted enough top/middle 6 guys later in the 1st and 2nd rounds since 2016.

I'm also not expecting the team to be a lot better right now if we had drafted a Thompson, Debrincat, Kyrou, Geekie, Dorofeyev, etc necessarily. I'm just saying that when our lotto pick level forwards do start producing, they'd have more support and we wouldn't have to hope we can get aging vets to sign here.
 
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Mr Rogers said:
I'm not complaining about not having found any star forwards after 2003 because the team was good for a long time. All i'm literally saying is that we haven't drafted enough top/middle 6 guys later in the 1st and 2nd rounds since 2016.

I'm also not expecting the team to be a lot better right now if we had drafted a Thompson, Debrincat, Kyrou, Geekie, Dorofeyev, etc necessarily. I'm just saying that when our lotto pick level forwards do start producing, they'd have more support and we wouldn't have to hope we can get aging vets to sign here.
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I'm guessing that had we had a few of those types, we'd 1) not have bottomed out as hard and would likely not have quite as good a set of youngsters, and 2) some might have been sold off anyway.

Regardless, overall in looking at the draft lists, I see no indication that we haven't drafted well. I don't think the team (Murray especially) made the most of the young assets he was given though. There was enough talent drafted at D and at F, that a shrewd GM would have found more than sufficient to keep the team good.
 
FiveTacos said:
I'm guessing that had we had a few of those types, we'd 1) not have bottomed out as hard and would likely not have quite as good a set of youngsters, and 2) some might have been sold off anyway.

Regardless, overall in looking at the draft lists, I see no indication that we haven't drafted well. I don't think the team (Murray especially) made the most of the young assets he was given though. There was enough talent drafted at D and at F, that a shrewd GM would have found more than sufficient to keep the team good.
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I'm not surprised you came back with that and you could very well be right. But we would've gotten something decent in return, much more than we did for Steel, Jones, Comtois, Perreault, Tracey, Ritchie, Etc. You could be right too that we wouldn't have bottomed out as hard, but still it shows a deficiency in forwards drafting. I don't find gross metrics like total games played by guys we drafted to be very relevant either, but that's just me. Like Steel, he wasn't a good pick to me.

And yes i think we are by and large a good drafting team as well. I just think criticism of our forwards drafting is fair ( still not saying it's dreadful) - This has nothing, zero, zilch, nichts to do with dmen, which i've already said we're great at. Agree to disagree on forwards.
 
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FiveTacos said:
Well there was a stretch when we did get legit NHL forwards at a high rate. Rakell, Palmieri, DSP, Karlsson, Kase, Terry, Steel ... all that in 8 drafts. That is WAY above the normal hit rate.

But yes, that well dried up for about 3 years, and that's hurt, but I don't think if we'd found 1 additional guy even of Terry's caliber that it would have drastically changed things.

Anything after that is just starting to trickle in (Colangelo the first of that next group). But that said, it could just be the law of averages. A 3 year series of misses really isn't much statistically. Individual drafts are miniscule sample sizes ... a 3 year period without a useful forward is to be expected from time to time no matter how good you are at drafting.

Objectively, I don't think you'll find many teams who were finding 7 NHL forwards in 8 years in the late 1st and beyond. And I'd also be careful of labeling high draft choices as "slam dunk picks." Plenty of teams whiff near the top of the draft, yet thus far it appears the only potential full on bust we have among our recent high picks is the one we traded for Gauthier. Top 10 picks usually fail at a much higher rate than 1 out of 6. Just consider, Ryan Strome was a top 5 pick, and he's actually a decent outcome for his draft position.

The biggest reason for our decline isn't the inability to draft well at a particular position ... it's that we didn't unearth any core star-level forwards for a long time after 2003. But to get a superstar forward even with high picks takes a lot of fortune; you can pick 2nd overall in a year where it's Kakko or Legwand, or you can pick 2nd in a year where it's Malkin or Eichel. To get a star forward outside of the top of the draft is mostly dumb luck ... no way the Bruins were expecting Pastrnak to be what he was.
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I think we kinda messed up between 2016-2018 drafts. In those drafts, we neglected drafting defenseman as we spent two picks in three drafts on d-men: Mahura in the 3rd round of the 2016 draft and Hunter Drew in the 6th round of the 2018 draft (who then converted to forward in the pros). Anaheim drafted more goalies in that 3-year draft set than defensemen! We hit more often on defensemen than forwards. Then we would use our pool of talented d-men to help acquire NHL forwards.

We all thought Comtois was a rising star. He got 7 pts in 10 games as a 20-year old before getting sent back to juniors. At age 22, he lead the Ducks in scoring and landed a new contract. Once he got paid, then he stopped working hard and it went all downhill from there. Comtois was our biggest flash.

Getting Washe to sign with us is potentially huge for our bottom-6. He's mostly a finished product physically and game-wise as well as top in FO's, which we truly need. If he can PK, then that's where he'll make his bread and butter with his FO skills. Winning the FO on the PK can kill 20-25 seconds, provided it's cleared out of the dzone.

Gaucher is a year or more away, but he and Washe could be a strong 4th line and PK'ers.
 
shach1 said:
It's guys like this that make me pissed we drafted Gaucher with our 1st. You can find a 3C or 4 C through NHL or college FA.

No need to spend first round picks there.
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Yeah but so can 31 other teams, and historically we lose the FA battle.

Drafting beyond the top ~10 picks is more about building redundancy in your system than it is about selecting individual players IMO.
 
Hockey Duckie said:
I think we kinda messed up between 2016-2018 drafts. In those drafts, we neglected drafting defenseman as we spent two picks in three drafts on d-men: Mahura in the 3rd round of the 2016 draft and Hunter Drew in the 6th round of the 2018 draft (who then converted to forward in the pros). Anaheim drafted more goalies in that 3-year draft set than defensemen! We hit more often on defensemen than forwards. Then we would use our pool of talented d-men to help acquire NHL forwards.
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I always wonder if maybe those years they actually didn't like the dmen available, which is valid ... or if they were trying to draft for "need," which I think is always a mistake. I can't imagine there were 3 years of so few D they liked though.

Bottom line though ... in terms of overall pipeline of talent, the scouting dept gave us enough to be better than we were. At some point it's up to the GM to convert that raw material into a proper roster.

Hockey Duckie said:
We all thought Comtois was a rising star. He got 7 pts in 10 games as a 20-year old before getting sent back to juniors. At age 22, he lead the Ducks in scoring and landed a new contract. Once he got paid, then he stopped working hard and it went all downhill from there. Comtois was our biggest flash.
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Comtois's flameout and Kase's concussions really hurt our depth at F. But I can't really blame scouting on those.
 
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I know this is difficult to parse, especially from the outside, but my contention for years is that the problem has not been with our drafting but with our player development. I'm not going to claim any of this is conclusive, but my evidence is as follows:
  • We know that neither the Samuelis nor Bob Murray liked to spend money, and I suspect that our player development department lacked significant resources. We know that other ancillary departments (such as analytics) were either non-existent or under-staffed. Part of my assumption here is that the player development issue plagues the team across the street which has similar issues with spending money, so I might be projecting unfairly.
  • Todd Marchant ran this department for years and, as far as I know, other than actually playing hockey he had no background or experience in player development.
  • There are always exceptions, but the Ducks often earned relatively high marks for their draft picks at the time of the draft, and we also often saw high ratings for their junior and college prospects. Many of these prospects disappointed once they got to the Ducks minor league system. Admittedly, this happens to every team, and I don't have data to verify that it happens more to the Ducks.
  • The Ducks seem to have an inordinate amount of young players who leave the organization and find greater levels of success elsewhere. Some of this is probably just the normal development curve, but some seems too drastic to be coincidence.
I know this argument relies on a ton of potential fallacies and assumptions, so I won't try to rigorously defend it. It just always struck me as odd when we'd draft a guy, see that guy praised throughout his amateur career, get him in the system, watch him spin his wheels, then see him build a career somewhere else. Where did we go wrong? The common denominator for these guys is their lack of development once they got into the Ducks system.

I think it's too early to know if Verbeek's player development department is successful. We've seen some guys look good, some guys go up and down, and others stagnate. But it's only been a year or two in the system for most of these guys (or less).
 
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cheesymc said:
So was the incentive to sign about 97k for him to play one game with us this season?
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It gets him to his 2nd contract negotiations immediately (assuming something hasn't already been agreed to). He could potentially be a rookie next season, while playing on a contract that pays more than an ELC. It's almost like he gets to skip the ELC entirely.
 
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FiveTacos said:
It gets him to his 2nd contract negotiations immediately (assuming something hasn't already been agreed to). He could potentially be a rookie next season, while playing on a contract that pays more than an ELC. It's almost like he gets to skip the ELC entirely.
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Yeah. With multiple teams pursuing him you’d have to think it was about organizational fit and negotiating that RFA contract ahead of time. Will be interesting to see what he gets next year and how soon it is announced.
 
FiveTacos said:
I always wonder if maybe those years they actually didn't like the dmen available, which is valid ... or if they were trying to draft for "need," which I think is always a mistake. I can't imagine there were 3 years of so few D they liked though.

Bottom line though ... in terms of overall pipeline of talent, the scouting dept gave us enough to be better than we were. At some point it's up to the GM to convert that raw material into a proper roster.
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Those three years were kinda meant to get a lot of darts to see if we might have something in preparation for the Twins to retire (or move on). We had a lot of defensive youth talent in the pipeline until the 2017 VGK expansion draft (lost Theodore) and center injuries in 2017 (lost Vatanen). The next season, to give the NHL club more offensive punch of the 2018-19 mid-season, Murray traded away Pettersson for F Daniel Sprong. We should have had a balance draft all along b/c at least you can fetch something for defensemen you keep finding outside the top-10.

Madden admitted that they were trying to start loading back up on defensemen in the 2019 draft. Here's a snippet from the Athletic after the 2019 draft. Although Stephens chose four previous drafts of having selected four d-men, it's much worse when just looking at the past three drafts (2016-18) where we used two picks on defensemen out of 18 draft picks. The fact they took four d-men after the first round should speak volumes that they could have drafted more d-men between 2016-18.

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I don't know if we had enough talent because we were forced to rush a few of the kids due to mass injuries with Steel and Lundy. Jones was too injury prone. Comtois destroyed his own career, but Kase couldn't keep his due to concussions. Just some bad luck with a lot of forwards, but great luck with defensemen. Which is probably why the Ducks would rather draft a forward in the top-10 b/c they don't have great luck drafting them outside the top-10 like they do with defensemen and goalies.

Bringing this back to Washe, the Ducks used to be at the forefront of snagging college UFA a long while back. Grabbing college UFA Washe is a good sign for Madden circling back to the college ranks. Let's hope he can be as successful as Andy Mac, Kunitz, or Penner.
 
Sure would’ve been nice to just see a bit more of him in this first of two games for evaluation.. 6 minutes. Looked decent considering how most of the game went and warming the bench. Almost got himself a goal
 
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Hockey Duckie said:
Bringing this back to Washe, the Ducks used to be at the forefront of snagging college UFA a long while back. Grabbing college UFA Washe is a good sign for Madden circling back to the college ranks. Let's hope he can be as successful as Andy Mac, Kunitz, or Penner.
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The Ducks were just pioneers back then. None of Andy or Kunitz would be available. And if I remember correctly it was mainly David McNab doing it.


Times were very different back then when we talk about college hockey.
 
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