I have a rule that saves me a lot of stress each and every year: don’t fall in love with undrafted prospects, because there’s a 1-in-31 chance that any particular player is going to be drafted by your team.
There are prospects that I grow to admire and hope that the Red Wings draft, but I try to not get so emotionally involved with any player who doesn’t have an NHL home.
The Detroit Red Wings’ decision to draft German-born defenseman Moritz Seider with their 6th overall pick in the 2019 NHL Draft caused more than a little consternation with the Red Wings’ still-sensitive fan base. I, too, am a little puzzled as to why the Wings picked a top-25 player so early, but I believe that the Wings’ scouts had to see something that the rest of us did not in order to make the pick that they did.
GM Steve Yzerman spoke with the Associated Press to discuss the Wings’ drafting of Moritz:
“He has excellent hockey sense. Obviously a big kid at 6-foot-3. Real good skater. In our opinion he’s one of the top defensemen in the draft,” Yzerman said. “Our next pick was 35. We had to make a decision. He wasn’t going to be there at 35.”
Yzerman has a huge job ahead in trying to re-establish the Red Wings as one of the premier clubs in the NHL. After 25 straight playoff appearances, the Red Wings have failed to reach the postseason in the past three years. Yzerman won the Stanley Cup three times as Red Wings captain and is back in Hockeytown after eight years as Tampa Bay Lightning GM and another as an adviser.
And clearly Seider was his first target.
“I wasn’t really going by position. I think anyone we would have picked we would have felt we were filling a need,” Yzerman said.
Cross your fingers, folks. The draft is not an exact science, and post-draft analysis would suggest that the Wings may have pulled off a relative coup here…But we won’t know for at least a couple of years whether Seider was a steal or a swing-and-a-miss.
Kind of love it.
Skating right handed large shut down defencekid that can still think under pressure, get a shot to a crowded net, and arrive in the NHL sooner than normally expected if we can believe the scouting and the vast quantity of Mr. Blashill drool.
His leadership being judged by our best leader in my lifetime is all I need to accept him at the highest draft pick the Wings will get for a long time
I also noticed Mr. Holland picking 8th….. think want for a skating defence was mutual ? …and impossible for Mr. Holland not to know almost all our scouts thoughts for this draft.