The whole "draft high to get elite players" strategy right now is not paying dividends.
RNH
Yakupov
Gagner
Paajarvi
We wasted 4 years to get these guys and none of them are star players. Two are gone for nominal returns, the other two aren't lighting it up. Lower picked players like Eberle and Hemsky turned out better, but the whole point of doing this was to get players better than Hemsky that we couldn't via trade/UFA. Hasn't worked.
Hall is the only one that's remotely in that upper tier and he's reckless/injured a lot of the time.
The crappy part is that Nuge, Gags and Yak would all be much better players right now if they were developed properly.
Nuge should have been an exception to the "#1 pick always starts right away" rule, the dude was a twig. He held his own, but he would have benefited so much by getting extra time to condition his body instead of getting run down every year and needing a big recovery period after the season is done. And of course what actually happened to him was worse than just having his body run down to nothing by the end of the year, he got injuries that lingered into the off-season. There's no way him or his agent could argue it was a good idea to rush him into the NHL at 165 lbs or whatever he was in 2011. I think Nuge will develop into a #1C eventually, but it's been a very hard road for him, lots of summers of development lost because of injuries. I think last summer was the first time he could train comfortably the whole time. He actually should have been shut down for surgery before the 12/13 season even began, but the hope selling was in full force that year.
Gags absolutely needed to be brought up slowly. He hit a brick wall with his development curve pretty early on and being gifted ice time right from the start made him feel like he never had to develop the defensive side of his game. That kept happening right up until he left, not even Eakins punished Gags for never ending mistakes, of course while Yak was benched for even the slightest error.
Yak, he needed a real coach for this 2nd and first half of his 3rd year, simple as that.