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NHL 2011 Draft Lottery


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Kovy's here for the next million years, hopefully Zach, Zajac and the "kids" Palmeiri / Josefson / Tedenby are all here for the long haul.

That is forward talent for quite some time.... aka years to come.

As for "D", your Mid Pairing comment is exactly why I suggest we use the pick to get a potential Doughty (unless RNH is available).

For whatever reason, I am big fan of Hamilton....

We also have good defensive prospects right now in Jon Merrill and Brandon Burlon (both at Michigan), as well as Urbom and Eric Gelinas, the latter two are closer to the NHL than anyone we may draft defensively. Offensively, most of our top prospects are already in the NHL or just outside, i.e. Henrique. We are severely lacking anything offensively in terms of depth on the farm.

RNH is not going to be available. Out of all the rumored top 5 picks, he is the one name I dont think we have a shot at. Everyone else a case could be made for them to fall i.e. Larsson and Landeskog.

With Urbom and Gelinas relatively close, our lack of offensive depth should be the priority this draft, if and only if, Adam Larsson is there. He's pretty much a consensus "sure thing", or as close to one as you can get in scouting defense which takes longer to develop.

We also have to consider that Patrik Elias is getting older. Brian Rolston is gone after next year, Clarkson provides very little, and despite the first year successes of Palmieri, Josefson, and Tedenby, they may not maintain that success going forward. We can get an impact player on the offensive side of the puck right now with our top 5 pick.

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the rugged player up front is usually cheap and not too hard to find around trade deadline. we can grab one from waivers.

We've got a legitimate chance to grab a future #1 center in the draft. Waivers? When was the last time we picked up someone from waivers that was worth a damn?

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ghdi is right about our prospect depth. If we were drafting for prospect needs, we would take a forward. That said, I think we'll be taking BPA at #4, because that's the right thing to do. For fun though, let's examine why forward prospects would be our current need.

We had some forward prospect depth recently, but now most of those promising players have graduated or about to. Our farm for promising forwards is pretty much down to Adam Henrique (with some unknowns being Mike Sislo, David Wohlberg, and Mike Hoeffel). The rest of our forwards are pretty much long-shots to reach their original potential at this point.

This lack of forward depth has come about quicker than expected due to the Devils playing most of the season with 4 rookie forwards in the lineup (and by trading away Halischuk, Bergfors, and Cormier in the last year). Now you could say that we're fine for a while because these recently graduated guys are young and will play for a long time, but ideally you always want to have balance in your system.

On defense, our promising prospect list has:

Merril

Urbom

Burlon

Gelinas

Sova (still mostly unknown)

Graduated, or close to it

Fayne

Taormina

That's a great list that has me pretty excited, but it's much longer than our list for promising forwards. Considering you need twice as many forwards in your lineup as you need dmen, I would say that our system is currently out of balance.

At #4, it's still got to be BPA all the way though. I think we'll see us trend with more forwards in the later rounds of the next few drafts though.

Edited by elias2600
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