Of Red Wings-related note on the last morning of June:
The Free Press’s Helene St. James posted both a video of Red Wings assistant GM/director of amateur scouting Kris Draper speaking with the media, and she posted a subscriber-only article about the Wings‘ second–day-of-the-draft picks. Here’s a particularly good anecdote:
[Charlie] Forslund was the guy Draper ended up seeing on a fluke. He wanted to scout Dominik Badinka (who ended up being drafted by the Carolina Hurricanes at No. 34) when Andersson, the team’s director of European scouting, intervened.
“I was in Sweden, I was supposed to see Badinka play, and he ended up being a healthy scratch,” Draper said. “I was literally getting on the train to Gothenburg to go watch him play and I got the call from Håkan that, ‘Badinka is not playing; we’d like you to go see Charlie Forslund.’
“I don’t even know where I went. It might have been his hometown of Falun. It was deep in Sweden.”
Forslund played at the lower level, but he stood out for his good size (6-3, 212 pounds): “He can skate and he can really shoot the puck,” Draper said. “He scored a couple goals that game. We did a lot of background checking and you sit there, this could potentially be somebody that could be really good for us down the road.”
St. James continues (paywall);
MLive’s Ansar Khan filed an article in which he defers to Steve Yzerman and Draper for capsule biographies of every one of the Red Wings’ 2024 picks…
Landon Miller
Position: Goaltender
2023-24: Sault Ste. Marie (OHL)
Selected: Fourth round (No. 126)
Height/Weight: 6-5/193
Yzerman: “We don’t want to draft a goalie just to draft a goalie, but we like to have enough goalie prospects, prospects at every position. With the goaltending thing, it’s a little more complicated. You want to make sure they have a runway, so to speak, to get to where they’re going and when they do turn pro, they have a spot to play, and we don’t have a logjam of goalies because we only have so many spots for goalies.”
Khan also continues (and just about everything from MLive is going behind a paywall now :/);
And finally, the Hockey News’s Connor Eargood posted a profile of Landon Miller, the aforementioned goaltender from the Soo Greyhounds:
The Red Wings drafted Miller after his first full season with the OHL’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, whose jersey bears a little resemblance to the Red Wings’ own sweaters. Miller played 30 games as the backup and finished with a 17-6-0 record. He also posted a 2.79 goals against average and a .889 save percentage in those games. He was the sixth ranked North American goaltender by NHL Central Scouting.
When asked about Miller, Red Wings general manager Steve Yzerman said that director of amateur scouting Kris Draper was more familiar with his game, but he did get to see Miller play one road game against the Flint Firebirds. Even with limited viewing, he said he noticed Miller’s size and the way he moved with it
Eargood also continues, and I think Miller is a good pick given that this year’s goaltending class was fair-to-middling. He’ll be able to take the ball and run with it in Sault Ste. Marie, and that’s a good thing development-wise.
