He'd go off the board even with a top 5 pick.
Speaking of the Top 5, anyone else still having nightmares about how bad Pouliot turned out? Yikes. That was fun.
Other than the Gillies pick, which was actually still in line with what some draft rankings had, Minnesota really didn't go off the board with any of their first round picks. Oh and Burns, that was a head scratcher at the time.
Pouliot didn't turn out that badly career wise. He carved out a pretty long career compared to others taken in the draft. In terms of GP, he is ranked 24th (still first round), 11th in goals, 23rd in assists and 17th in points. In terms of first rounders, there are only 8 (!) players that were taken that had better point totals than Pouliot in his career, 3 of whom were taken before Minnesota's pick.
IIRC, either Lemaire or Risebrough didn't want Pouliot at center and wanted Demitra. In the off-season, Pouliot had lined up at center and looked good between Demitra and Gaborik, but for whatever the case they wanted Pouliot on wing.
As for the Kopitar pick, I wanted him, but there was a significant amount of unknown as he was Slovenian and no one knew how good he would develop. Yes, he was playing in the SEL, but some were concerned his numbers were inflated. Kopitar was picked around where most had him, lower half of the top 10.
But Gaborik, Koivu, Bouchard, Thelen, Pouliot, Sheppard, Gillies, Cuma were all picked in the range most scouts/analysts had them ranked. Burns was the only off-the-wall pick.
Second round is dicey and then after that it was a shit show.
The biggest issue was that Minnesota has never put prospects in a position to succeed until recently. The difference between DR and Chuck vs Guerin is like night and day. Joel Eriksson-Ek I don't think would have been in the NHL immediately. Kunin either. As much crap as we like to sling with Guerin, at least he is showing some levels of patience and development with the prospects instead of tossing them in off the deep end and going, well shit that didn't work. We gotta just drop them down to the bottom 6 and hope we can get a grinder out of them.
I'd rank the GMs as Guerin > Fenton > DR > Chuck, personally.
