Some teams are known for their drafting record.
The Colorado Avalanche, the New Jersey Devils under David Conte, year over year find a great player in the first round, but then others further down. Their bust quotients are never that high, their cupboards always restocked.
Other franchises, including all three Western Canadian clubs have the exact opposite when it comes to gem finding performance, making competitiveness a battle year in and year out.
But could that be changing, at least in Alberta?
The Oilers have had some recent success turning number one picks Andrew Cogliano and Sam Gagner into an immediate second line. These players have a large say in many pundits picking the Oilers as a team on the rise as early as this upcoming season.
In Calgary, things too seem to be looking up.
The downtrodden years of the late 90’s were built on a dropping Canadian dollar, escalating NHL salaries, but also a terrible draft record. One that left the Flames scrambling to fill out an NHL roster with players that could compete. The team was forced to find reclamation projects around the circuit and build them back into the players they were once meant to be.
A terrible era of number one picks from 1985 to 1993 featured only one above average NHL player in Cory Stillman, a player that really only found his top six legs after moving on in a deal for Craig Conroy. Names like Chris Biotti, Bryan Deasley, Jason Muzzatti, Niklas Sunblad and Jesper Mattson were selected in the first round though only went on to play a combined 64 games in the NHL. Part of the reason for this run of terror was a high draft pick brought on by good regular season success by the Flames, but in a 21 team league it was still a poor excuse for almost a decade of futility.
You may not hit a home run every year with your first round pick, but you had better find at least an average NHL player more often than not.
For Calgary it was not, not and more not.
Which brings us to the winding down rookie camp and the most recent Flames draft picks.
It’s July, it’s a summer camp of rookies and it doesn’t matter a hill of beans when it comes to this fall or winter and the Calgary Flames fortunes in the 2008-09 season.
However, it’s hard not to notice that a trio of first round picks selected from 2005 through 2007 are getting a fair amount of press (Apologies to recent pick Greg Nemisz as his time to shine wouldn’t be a month after his selection).
In Matt Pelech, Leland Irving and Michael Backlund the Flames appear to have found the next troika, similar to the long standing Robyn Regehr, Miikka Kiprusoff, Jarome Iginla group of which the franchise is built around.
All three are well on course, and have received rave reviews in camp, with Pelech and Backlund getting some mention for NHL time as early as this season. It’s way too early to call these draft picks home runs, but things appear to be shaping up in Calgary with a player at each of the three positions coming along nicely.
Which begs the question, could these three years be the best three year run of first round picks in Calgary history? We won’t know for a decade, but looking back over the years they just may be.
Early 80’s
The Flames didn’t possess their first round pick in 1982, but the three first round picks from 1981, 1983 and 1984 were likely the best all time selections in a three year period in team history. In 1981 they selected Hall of Famer Al MacInnis, followed by Dan Quinn and then Gary Roberts three years later.
All three had solid careers, with two of the players possibly the best at their position in Flames history.
Mid 90’s
The Flames failed to hit an out and out star in the mid 90’s but they did get back into the game by finding average NHL hockey players. From 1995 to 1997 they pulled in Denis Gauthier, Derek Morris and Chris Dingman. The trio has played almost 1600 NHL games with the first two spending ample time in Calgary uniforms, and all three being traded in transactions that greatly helped rebuild the current Flames club.
Early 00’s
Probably the second strongest group of three successive draft years would be the era of 2001 to 2003.
In these drafts the Flames grabbed Chuck Kobasew, since traded to Boston, Eric Nystrom and of course Dion Phaneuf. Nystrom is a bottom roster energy player, and Kobasew was wildly inconsistent, but the selection of Phaneuf puts this threesome on the map.
So fast forward ten years and guess where you see the above mentioned picks from 2005 through 2007. It doesn’t take a stretch to foresee a dynamic number one center, a top four defensive defenseman and possibly the team’s next number one goaltender.
Optimism? You bet, but that’s what summer camps are for isn’t?
