Wednesday, March 31, 2010

THE BIG DRAFT COMPARISON PART #1

Inspired by the draft discussion* in the thread before this one, I thought it might be a good time to do a full up comparison. It's a big job to tackle, so this will be a 2 part thing. First up the 1990's draft comparison.

Here are the players drafted by the Leafs and Sens from 92-99. They played a minimum of 100 NHL games to make this list and any time I mention "NHLers" in this comparison that means players with over 100 games.

OTTAWA
1992: (1)Alexei Yashin, (3)Patrick Traverse.
1993: (1)Alex Daigle, (2)Radem Bicanek, (9)Pavel Dmitra.
1994: (1)Radek Bonk, (2)Stanislav Neckar, (6)Danielle Alfredsson,
1995: (1)Brian Burard, (3)Brad Larsen
1996: (1)Chris Phillips, (6)Andreas Dackell, (9)Sami Salo
1997: (1)Marian Hossa, (3)Josh Langfeld, (5)Magnus Arvedson, (9)Karel Rachunek
1998: (2)Mike Fisher, (4)Peter Shastlivey, (6)Chris Neil
1999: (1)Martin Havlat, (3)Chris Kelly

TORONTO
1992: (1)Grant Marshall, (3)Nikolai Borchevsky, (8)Ryan Vandenbussche, (11)Nathan Dempsey.
1993: (1)Kenny Jonsson, (1)Landon Wilson
1994: (3)Freddy Modin, (10)Sergei Berezin
1995: (6)Yannick Tremblay, (9)Dani Markov
1996: (8)Thomas Kaberle
1997: (4)Adam Mair, (7)Shawn Thornton
1998: (1)Nik Antropov, (4)Alex Ponikorovsky
1999: NIL

This era quite easily goes to the Senators who picked 1st overall three times in this span. What's strange is that most of Ottawa's best players weren't from those top three picks that Ottawa had a whopping five straight years. So there was some luck involved for Ottawa. Unless Sens fans think it was all part of the plan that Ottawa took Mike Gaffney with their 131st and Afraidsson with the 133rd pick in 1994? I didn't think so.

This doesn't mean Leaf fans have anything to snicker about. Antropov was a 10th overall pick, sure, but he's only the 2nd best player on that list next to Kaberle who was sheer luck as an 8th round pick. The Leafs also drafted absolutely NO NHL players in 1999. That's kind of pathetically amazing actually, but you'll only have to wait until tomorrow to find out when ttawa accomplished this same feat.

Tomorrow I'll dig up 2000-2009 when neither club was an expansion team, so the gloves will be off.

* - by discussion I mean guys with white gloves slapping each other across the face until somebody gets a bloody nose.

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