Heroic Shrimp said:
*sigh* Do we really need to do this....?
Well, asking consent is important but I want you to know that you only have to reply to whatever posts you want to.
Heroic Shrimp said:
So, yeah, as you know, I was talking about the prospect of obtaining "high-end" defensemen to offer some hope that it is indeed possible beyond the earliest picks of any given draft. Adding information specifically about the most recent Norris winners was an easy way to illustrate the point, given that we can all agree that Norris winners fit the "high-end" bill.
So, silly me, in this discussion which started with someone lamenting the signing of Drew Doughty I sort of figured the topic at hand was the much discussed issue of the Leafs lack of a real top of the league sort of defenseman, how to get one in relatively short order(so as to line up with the rest of the core's best years) and the extent to which drafting where the Leafs are drafting is a realistic way to accomplish both of those things(adding a high end defenseman, relatively soon)
So kind of glossing over that list, again, to me the issue is not can the Leafs draft guys who are improvements over Hainsey and Zaitsev but rather guys who are a step up from the two pretty good guys they have in Rielly and Gardiner. That, to me, is the definition I'd use for "high-end". Who of the guys on that list would be marked improvements over Rielly and Gardiner and who might be that in fairly short order.
But even then, ok, we don't need to talk about Lubomir Visnovsky's two pretty flukey seasons or who was drunk enough in 2012 to give Dan Girardi a couple of first place Norris votes. I will concede that drafting players of that calibre where the Leafs are drafting is possible while still maintaining that the average age of their combined 3 top 10 Norris Trophy voting seasons is a little over 30 years old. Finding guys who have big years at 27-32 would be great but it would be a long ways away and I really, genuinely don't think that's the sort of thing that was being lamented. If I'm wrong and what cabber genuinely meant was that he didn't think it was possible to draft a guy who would finish 10th in Norris voting at the age of 32 the way Mark Streit did, well, mea culpa.
Heroic Shrimp said:
As to how quickly these top defensemen step up and establish themselves, well, several factors are at play. It really shouldn't be shocking that a highly touted defense prospect drafted, say, #2 overall steps in and plays right away on a terrible team. They get to play and they often get lots of minutes. But then Chara picked at #56 was playing 22:52 a night by the time he was 22. In Duncan Keith's first season in the NHL at the age of 22, he led Chicago at 23:26. Subban, picked at #43, was averaging 22:16 at the age of 21 and won the Norris at 24. These guys were clearly pretty good in the NHL pretty quickly without the high draft pick pedigree. None of them were picked top 3 and even old man Chara was drafted 7 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Right, so, I guess our definition of "pretty good" is going to differ slightly when you're including a season when Chara had 11 points in 65 games playing 22 minutes a night for a team that went 24-48-9-1. Or Keith putting up 21 points for a pretty terrible Blackhawks team.
If you look at the time gap between when they were drafted and when they began to be some sort of version of the players they eventually became, and to echo your sentiments let's use the first years they got Norris votes, then in Keith's case it's six seasons after he was drafted, in Subban's case it's six seasons after he was drafted and in Chara's case it's seven seasons after he was drafted.
So yeah, I'm going to stick with saying that even if you do draft a really high end defenseman outside of the first round then realistically you're looking at 4-6 years post draft before they start rounding into that high-end form even if they're eating minutes on bad teams before that.
Heroic Shrimp said:
As to the observation about a "minimum" 4-6 years of defense development time before being a significant improvement over current Leafs, I find it kind of baffling, given that Travis Dermott, age 21 and drafted #34 three years ago, literally just took that step. Sure, average defensemen can and often do take longer to develop, but better defensemen don't. Frankly, I don't know Dermott's ceiling any more than I know Liljegren's or Sandin's or Durzi's, but I know that I can't rule out high-end potential for any of them. If they're capable of hitting it, it doesn't have to take 4-6 (or more) years.
So again, I don't think the issue here was finding someone who was a "significant improvement" over anyone on the Leafs roster but a player who would, themselves, significantly improve the Leafs defensive group. Again, I'm thinking cabber wasn't saying "Oh drat, Drew Doughty signed. Now we'll never find a better 3rd pairing RHD".
So, again, going back to the point above it is pretty uncommon for a player to be drafted outside of the top 5 and contributing at a high level on the blue line without 4-6 years of development time.
Heroic Shrimp said:
Anyway, in the end, all my little example was really about was to say that there is reasonable justification for hope and potential for surprise, even if you'd insist otherwise.
I like to think you know me well enough that you know what I'm saying here isn't "you can't draft good players outside of the first round. For starters, I think you know I'm not that dumb.
I really don't get why you're being so salty here. My point was pretty similarly simple. All I was saying is that while drafting players like that is possible, I think that having the sort of defensemen that cabber is lamenting we don't have in the Drew Doughty thread either comes to a team via the top of the draft or a fairly patient development process. Again, call me crazy but I don't read that as being entirely full of doom and gloom.
