Which is only three picks - Mueller, Goldobin and Merkley - all of whom were drafted in a range where prospects historically have a 20-25% chance of developing into full time NHLers.
This is just how the draft works and why IMO it's a waste of time to pay attention to individual prospects drafted outside the top 10. The vast majority will never make it and nobody seems good at predicting which ones will ahead of time.
Spot on. I browsed through all the drafts since the Sharks entered the league a few days ago. I only looked at the first two rounds, cause even if a great player was picked in a later round, that doesn’t mean he should have been picked earlier as the fact that he went later than 2nd round indicates he was a late bloomer/on an unexpected development curve.
Like poker, the draft is a game of incomplete information and you can’t judge your decisions in hindsight. If you fold on the turn cause you correctly assume you are behind and the river shows your only out, that hurts, but folding was still the right move.
With those baselines, I saw a lot of Sharks picks that didn’t work out, but the picks around those picks where almost always as bad or even worse. There were a few instances (Miller was already given as an example, Timo over Miko still hurts), where they left better value on the table, but almost all of the „glaring misses“ were an result of a shallow pool at the time of the pick, not of terrible scouting.
Eg: Getting Rathje 3rd OA is pretty underwhelming, but there were very few players in the first two rounds, that - in hindsight - offered a clear better value.
What hasn’t happend in a long time is a late round lottery ticket striking gold (Nabby, Clowe, Pavs, Kipper), but that’s more about pure luck than anything…
Conclusion for me: 1st-round-picks by good teams a grossly overrated.
