It's obviously not a pure binary. That's just an easy way to talk about it. To be a "winner" you have to produce a lot. You can't just focus on playing defense and working hard. That's not how that works. Similarly, you can never produce if you don't have the puck. If all you can do is skate, dangle, shoot and pass, your team will never have the puck. Crosby was the best player of the last generation and he's the epitome of "the world's most skilled grinder."
But I do think that we can talk about priorities and see that the Wings are clearly not setting production as their highest priority (or less dominantly so than most teams). In the Kasper draft, Matt Savoie was taken with the next pick. He may be less likely to be a center, and honestly his development has been just okay since, but at the time of the draft, he was the higher skill, more productive option. We took Kasper. You can make similar arguments with Danielson and Benson. You can make similar arguments with MBN and Eiserman (or Hage or whoever). And we're seeing how that can play out, both MBN and Danielson have been showing a higher skill tier than at the time of their draft, and thus they look to be well on their way to fulfilling the promise of a "winner" and a "producer." Kasper, it's harder to say, but we seem pretty likely to end up with at least a decent third liner.
Essentially, it's much less that the players themselves are binary as much as our drafting strategy is (which also isn't a pure binary of course). In general if two guys seem to have a similar expected value, we're taking the guy whom is having more of that value come from his defense and character.
To me, Edvinsson is a lottery pick quality player- does it all and has the qualities to be an elite, productive winner. We've slow burned him and that's hurt his perception, even in hind sight, but I don't think the Red Wings compromised on anything with him. I also think that the drafting philosophy around D and F are too different for this to be too useful for this discussion.
I think Yzerman has shown a clear way for him to acquire high skill guys. He's great at collecting productive wingers in trade and free agency. Kane and Debrincat are at the top of the list, but he's also brought in Perron, Fabbri, and Tarasenko. I'm not sure if that's the way that he conceives of this whole deal, but it wouldn't be surprising to me if he had a game plan: "draft big, two way D first. Then draft your two-way character centers. Draft a goalie every year. If I end up without enough productive wingers, I can just get them through trade/FA."
