If we're going to be VERY honest, a first round pick in the 20's is very pointless. if you're the islanders, and lets say there's a good player being tossed around for a 1st or 2nd (Lets assume it's someone like Maccelli or Sharangovich), then you make that deal and you try to bolster that roster. We want a cup. I want to keep Eiserman but not every pick will be an Eiserman.
Hmmm, "pointless" would seem to be the wrong word here.
I mean, these picks haven't been pointless to, say, Washington. Have they hit on all their picks in the 20s? Absolutely not. But here are some of the hits they've had since 2004.
2004: Jeff Schultz 27, Mike Green 29
2006: Sergei Varlamov 23
2008: John Carlson 27
2009: Marcus Johansson 24
2010: Evgeny Kuznetzov 26
2013: Andre Burkovsky 23
2015: Ilya Samsonov 22
And these three guys below are still in their "breaking in" phase since the 2019 draft, with the early returns looking pretty nice:
Connor McMichael 25, Hendrix Laperriere 22, and Ivan Miroshnichenko 20.
I mean, I sure wouldn't have minded seeing the Isles make all these pointless picks. Washington practically built their Cup-winning team on them.
Fact is, a good scouting staff finds players EVERYWHERE in the draft, and especially throughout the first two rounds. There is enough talent being produced worldwide nowadays.
CAVEAT:
This is not an argument against trading first rounders. They are a serious commodity and at some point, pushing yourself over the edge in the direction of a Stanley Cup usually always comes with moving a few.
But these picks have value and are never pointless, certainly not because they're in the tail end of the first round.
***
PS) Despite the incredible trend of grammatical nonsense that has been going on for years now, an apostrophe was never intended to indicate the plural for a number range or an abbreviation.
For example, it's "The GMs" and "The 20s" and "View the GTCs".
The overwhelming chief use of the apostrophe was always intended to indicate possession, and not plurals.
Names like the Oakland A's show the exception as the team name is "Athletics" and the apostrophe is used here to simply indicate that all letters between "A" and "s" are being excluded for brevity. It likely would have been smarter to use something else for these situations, like A/s, because now folks all over the place seem to think it's legit to indicate plural using an apostrophe.
Which is hogwash.
