The draft … the crapshoot

Here’s my feeling on the NHL Draft for the Rangers, and it’s the same as every draft: I don’t know. You don’t know. They don’t know. Nobody knows. And we won’t know for years. That’s the nature of the animal. Unless you’re getting one of those clear-cut NHL-ready stars like a Crosby, an Ovechkin, a Taylor Hall, there’s no way to judge a draft until, like wine, it ages. Kids picked in later rounds routinely turn out to be better than players picked in the first round. The Rangers have historically done better in later rounds: such as when they selected Henrik Lundqvist in the seventh round (after taking Filip Novak, Dominic Moore, Premsyl Duben, Nathan Martz, Brandon Snee and Sven Helfenstein) in 2000; or when they selected Doug Weight second after picking Michael Stewart first, and then got Sergei Zubov in the fifth round and Sergei Nemchinov in the 12th round (!) in 1990. I always go back to the first NHL draft that defi...