Draft-day thoughts

“Down the road,” Ted Nolan is quoted here, “some of these kids could fit in very nicely.”

And both halves of that line are dead-solid appropriate.

You can talk all you want about the Islanders restocking their system, but obviously almost all of these kids are two years away from even Bridgeport, especially since the 20-year-old is ticketed for an overage year.

And if you buy that the draft is a crapshoot, the good part about having 13 picks is that, simply, you give yourself a better chance to produce multiple players. In that, it’s a brilliant draft: There were 211 kids picked, and the Islanders control the rights to six percent of them. Sounds like Bailey will be a player, and they seem to have a nice balance of college and junior kids.

The only thing that gives me pause is this: It’s very difficult to get top-notch offensive talent. It costs a ton in free agency, and that type hasn’t been breaking down the doors of the Coliseum. It’s also very difficult to get big-time, top-pair defensemen. Ditto. Filatov is projected as the former; Schenn, as the latter. It has to be an overwhelming deal to give that up.

Well, instead of Filatov or Schenn, they have Ness and Niemi and Ullstrom and Bailey and Toronto’s 2009 second-round pick. That’s a one, two twos, a three and a four.

To sum up: crapshoot, whether you’ve got one 18-year-old or five. We’ll revisit this in about four or five years.

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If you want to replace “Filatov or Schenn” with “Wilson,” remove Ness.

And then of course there’s the Petrov factor, as Greg Logan notes. But two high-end offensive talents wouldn’t be a bad thing to have, whether their names both end in “-ov” or not.

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Miriam, I think they’ve usually brought in most of their picks for the kiddie camp, though I think there are usually one or two who miss out. (Proportionally, this year, that’s, what, three or four?)

If you like numbers, read my GHO sidebar tomorrow check out all 27 trades made at the draft. Within: Pavel Bourret from the Rangers to Phoenix. He’s one of only nine players involved in these 27 trades, and one of those deals was basically a two-players-for-one-player deal with a draft pick involved.

Our ol’ buddy E.J. McGuire compares Schenn and Tyler Myers to “the lions guarding the gate at the library.” Which one’s Patience, and which one’s Fortitude?

Unlike Bridgeport and DiBenedetto, Binghamton apparently expects third-rounder Zack Smith to come in next year.

Mirtle notes the drafting of David Carle after a bad-break diagnosis Thursday. (Well, bad break for the career; heaven willing, good luck for the personal future.)

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OK. So we’re through that. And, in about 15 hours, we should be through the GHO, too. Qualifying offers are due Wednesday. We’ll go from there.

Michael Fornabaio