…Jordan Schroeder… maybe.

I think it’s more likely they take a Minnesotan with one of their three fourth round picks. There are a lot of prospects that fall into that range.

Bob Gainey is currently acting as both coach and G.M., but I have to think that his hold is very tenuous on both positions, depending how the team fares in the playoffs. He has made some head scratching hockey decisions as G.M., (especially firing Guy Carbonneau when he did), and the franchise really doesn’t seem much further ahead now than when he took over 6 years ago. The team is supposedly up for sale, and most of the prospective bidders are local and/or Francophones. In the event that George Gillett sells controlling interest I assume that the new owners would probably like to start over with new management.

….I have a feeling that his dad told him to ease off the gas pedal a bit prior to the draft. Being a high NHL draft pick has no real advantages (financially), as it does in other sports, and just brings added pressure. Look at David Fischer (or Blake Wheeler before him), their entire college careers have been clouded by expectations stemming from their draft position. Ray Ferraro was a 4th round draft pick back in the day, (despite setting a single season WHL goal scoring record that still stands), and he went on to have a great NHL career with very little pressure attached.

Sitting down to family dinners with a his dad, step mom Cammi Granato, (and Tony), I would have to think the topic of where the best spot to land in the draft must have come up a few times. A 17 or 18 year old is going to be the same player in the pro ranks 5 years on, whether he was taken first overall or dead last in the draft. Top few picks usually end up on disfunctional franchises as well.

Also, what is the scoop on Zach Budish? I remember he was considered a potential first pick prior to the season and had a serious injury. Any updates?

You know who else largely disdains college players? The Detroit Red Wings. They have three on their roster right now, only one of whom, Brett Lebda, entered the organization based upon the strength of his college credentials. The other two are Chelios and Brian Rafalski. Considering them to be college players that the team went after is wrong. Of course, the same thing is true about the Wild and Brian Rolston.

Risebrough and Lemaire were not good for the Wild organization, but that has a lot more to do with them not being able to develop talent from anywhere, not specific places they didn’t look. It’s always best to focus your scouting efforts somewhere rather than covering the whole universe of potential players. It doesn’t have to be the NCAA. The Red Wings do Sweden, and they know it better than anyone else.

I predicted from the very beginning of this team that Lemaire was a horrible choice. What I said at the time was that his system was going to do a good job of making a bad team look better than it really was, and that it would prevent the development of a really good team. You don’t lose if you never give up a goal, but you never win if you don’t score any.

For a variety of reasons, in just about every sport where players play both offense and defense, it’s much easier to find guys that play good defense than it is to find guys that can score. Hockey is no exception. The innate abilities needed to defend is a shorter list than those needed to score goals. Speed helps and size helps, but the only qualities really needed, for those that have the minimum skills needed to even be considered for NHL duty, is positional smarts and willpower. That’s it. You don’t need good hands. You don’t need outstanding peripheral vision.

One of my favorite college players ever was David Huntzicker, at Michigan. I saw him play four times as a freshman: the Showcase games, and the Frozen Four games. I was instantly wowed by him. My father, who had watched Michigan all year. didn’t see it at first. He was big, slow, and had no scoring touch whatsoever. What struck me was that he was never out of position. He had the foot speed of a possum, but forwards rarely beat him to the outside. My father saw it by the next year, and we still talk about him. (The 1998 final was one of the most interesting tactical games I’ve ever seen; I’ll have to write about it on my blog sometime.) He had reconstructive knee surgery, twice, so he only got slower over his career, but he was still good.

By the time you’re at the NHL level, smarts and dedication aren’t in short supply. That means that it isn’t hard to put together a team that can play great defense. Lemaire did that. Putting together a good offensive team, now that’s hard. In addition to being rarer, good offensive players don’t want to play on defense first teams. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Not only is playing offensive hockey more fun, but people everywhere prefer to work somewhere that takes advantage of the things they do well. Athletes aren’t any different. Offensive players want to play in offensive systems.* They don’t want to play for Jacques Lemaire.

Lemaire and Loophole Lou won with an all defense team in New Jersey a decade ago because they had a new way to play defense: all trap, all the time. No one knew how to beat it, and it shifted the balance between offense and defense. But guess what? Coaches adapt. They figured out how to beat it. Not perfectly, of course. Every team has adopted some of the Lemaire system into their game. Now, what differentiates them is whether or not they can score as well as trapping. The all defense approach won’t work right now, and it won’t again until someone finds a new way to implement it. Lemaire isn’t that guy.

*As with this entire post, football is a different beast. By having one set of players that play only offense, and another set of players that play only defense, it has a completely different dynamic.

Hello,

A few corrections to offer: The Wild have drafted six players from Minnesota if you include Irmen.

You missed Mike Erickson, who in 2002 went in the 3rd round, 72nd overall. Erickson had two forgettable seasons for the Gophers and transferred to Western Michigan.

Irmen was a 3rd round pick and Medvec a 4th round pick.

Thanks for your work on this blog. It is my favorite hockey blog.