Leaderboard

Yes. Yes you are. His name is Brendan Smith... Seriously though, the only thing I've gathered from this, is that we're long overdue. I'm still not sure we have a true stud number one, but I think a few have the potential to become top pair defensemen. Most will end up as 2nd pair or lower, and that's fine, but I'm really hoping at least one (Cholowski?) turns out to be a big time player for us. Also since Kronwall, we've drafted our first defenseman in each year at... 2001 - Blatak (129) 2002 - Berggren (131) 2003 - Quincey (132) 2004 - Kolosov (151) 2005 - Kindl (19) 2006 - Pyett (212) 2007 - Smith (27) 2008 - Nicastro (91) 2009 - Fournier (90) 2010 - Marshall (201) 2011 - Ouellet (48) 2012 - McKee (140) 2013 - Wheaton (139) 2014 - N/A 2015 - Saarijarvi (73) 2016 - Cholowski (20) 2017 - Lindstrom (38) In 17 years, only three 1st round picks (Kindl, Smith, Cholowski), four 2nd round picks (Ouellet, Sproul (same year), Hronek (same year as Cholowski), and Lindstrom), and the rest were 3rd round our later. It's no wonder we've never had much luck drafting and developing defensemen when we simply haven't drafted enough, high enough... We seem to be tipping the scale a little in recent years, which is great, and hopefully one or... five of these guys pan out to be very good players for us...

Since reality is setting in that the Joe is not long for this Earth, I had to fly my drone to 3d map the building so it will live on. 996 photos (around 5GB) make up this 12.02 gigapixel model. It took about 30 minutes total to capture over the course of 3 batteries. Probably somewhere around 5 miles total of flying zig zag back and forth across it to capture all angles. https://www.altizure.com/s/Sy4qAzMDZ

Quite frankly I thought it was good that he was shining in the developmental camp drills even while he's been out of commission since January. Obviously the work ethic and personal conditioning strengths are there. Hockey wise none of us have really seen anything yet and probably won't see him at 100% until mid way through this season, may be even longer. It took Mantha an entire season to recover from the broken leg and actually perform at his personal level. Broken wrists are worse. I predict he won't make the AHL squad till the end of the season just as Cholowski didn't. And it won't be because he's not good enough, probably because he's not going to be 100% for a long time. Maybe he'll get some playoffs games with the Griffins.

During prospect camp he couldn't even participate in the scrimmage. I'd assume they don't want him taking too many faceoffs. When I read some of his scouting reports previously, I saw that he was the key faceoff taker on his teams he played on previously; so it could be injury still.

NO.

Yes, but if that is the case, that wasn't the best planning by Holland and his staff. I know it was Nicklas Lidstrom, but even the perfect human had to retire at some point, and he was 40 years old. Realistically, they should have been setting themselves up for Lidstrom's retirement much sooner than 2011. I know you should "take the best player available", but at some point you need to draft for team need, and it was clear that defense should have been addressed a lot sooner. 22 of their 74 draft picks (less than 30%) in that time were defensemen, and of those 22 defensemen that were selected, they averaged 178th overall. That's crazy! In saying that, a big reason that number was so high was because they traded away a lot of picks at that time, going on Stanley Cup runs. It's hard to fault them for that, as it proved to be a successful strategy. And it's not even like they selected forwards every year, passing on high end defensemen. For the most part, especially earlier (2001-2006), they picked best player (defenseman) available, even using hindsight. We could have had Subban in 2007, but we did take a defenseman in Smith, who at the time was regarded as a higher potential defenseman, so it's hard to fault them for that. In 2008, they took McCollum, and even back then I hated that pick, mainly because I don't like taking goalies that high in the draft. In hindsight, they could have taken Voynov or Josi with that pick if they were targeting defensemen, which they probably should have at that point. 2009 was a very weak draft for defensemen (outside of the top half of the first round), so it's hard to fault them for the Ferraro pick. In 2010 when they took Sheahan, they could have had Faulk, but that would have been a bit of a reach at the time, and they would have had to get very lucky to pick him out of all the other terrible defensemen that we're selected around him. So I guess, I'm not sure what they could have done to better prepare for Lidstrom's retirement, other than trade up in the top 10-15, but even that would have been a bit of a crap shoot. So I guess more than anything, they were unlucky taking defensemen for quite a few years. Hopefully that is about to change with the high volume of defensemen taken in the past few years. The more I hear about Cholowski, the more excited I'm getting for him. I'm definitely going to pay close attention and watch some of his games this season.

D drafted since 2001 (Kronwall taken in 2000) not including last 3 drafts since its too early. Looks like Smith & E are the best we drafted since Kronwall. 2011 class/Jensen are still up in the air, but for the most part these guys are pretty much no names. To be fair though, ALOT of these guys are low end picks. Source: http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/draft/teams/dr00005492.html 2001 - Miroslav Blatak, Dmitry Bykov, Francois Senez 2002 - Johan Berggren, Derek Meech, Pierre-Olivier Beaulieu, Jonathan Ericsson 2003 - Kyle Quincey, 2004 - Sergei Kolosov, Nils Backstrom 2005 - Jakub Kindl, Jeff May, Juho Mielonen, Bretton Stamler 2006 - Logan Pyett 2007 - Brendan Smith, Bryan Rufenach, 2008 - Max Nicastro 2009 - Gleason Fournier, Nick Jensen, Adam Almquist 2010 - Ben Marshall 2011 - Xavier Ouellet, Ryan Sproul, Mattias Backman, Richard Nedomlel, Alexey Marchenko 2012 - Mike McKee, James De Haas 2013 - Mitch Wheaton, Marc McNulty 2014 - None

All hail the mighty cube.

Looks like the freaking Borg.

360 degree aerial panorama I made from a flight Sunday evening