Monday Mailbag – Use or Trade the 4th Overall Pick?

The weekend is over, you’re back at work, and you need a way to kill some company time until the Connorversary Party on June 24th at the Pint Downtown. With that, I introduce another edition of the Monday Mailbag. The mailbag only works because of you guys, if you have a question you can email it to me at baggedmilk@oilersnation.com. Enjoy the break from productivity, my friends.

Chiarelli will explore all options, but I suspect it is more likely to see them trade down instead of getting immediate help, only because we rarely see NHL players traded for top-five picks. My gut says they end up selecting fourth overall.

They’ll shop the pick in an attempt to address other needs.

I think it’s a 50/50 chance they either trade it or pick one of Tkachuk or Dubois with it. I know Chychurn just became the next Bobby Orr in the eyes of Oiler fans purely because he has a chance to be drafted by the team, but unless the Oilers trade down (most lists have Chychurn around eighth or ninth) I don’t see them taking a D-man with the number four pick purely because the defence is still an ongoing work in progress. My ideal scenario is they use the pick as part of a package for an actual, top three NHL d-man who can step into the lineup immediately next year and make a difference. Yak and the fourth for Hamonic maybe?

Yes! I can see scenarios where they could do all three of those things. First things, top five picks don’t get traded very often anymore. They have an incredible amount of value in the salary cap era. So Edmonton could absolutely use the pick if they aren’t offered enough for it. That said, I think they could address their defense by trading the fourth straight up for a quality defender or even grab a lesser (still top four) D as they trade down.

I believe they will trade down, to be honest. I think it will be something like No. 4 overall and a player for a later pick and a useful defenseman.

I hope they trade the pick. Now, before you get into the expansion draft and losing players and blah blah blah — I don’t care. I want the Oilers to win hockey games now. Not to mention, the clock is ticking on McDavid’s ELC. 

If you want a top-end forward your best chance is to take him in the top-five. D-men and goalies take longer to develop, especially goalies, and it is more difficult to predict where they will be in five years compared to forwards.

As for most desired on draft day, not necessarily. D-men and goaltenders, in general, take longer to develop. Some teams opt for the immediate big bang of a forward and look to find guys for the blue line with later picks or let other teams go through the growing pains and the cost of development and then trade or go the free agency route to fill those positions.

Historically forwards are easier to evaluate at that age as compared to goalies or D. Putting up tons of points is a pretty black and white way to measure a forward, whereas with a goalie his success and/or failure could be a mixture of a lot of things; does he play behind a great defensive team? Is he benefitting from solid systems play? Does he play in a weak division, etc. And with D-men I think generally they need to mature physically more so than forwards do, before being able to step in and making an impact at the NHL level, which is hard to do as a still growing 18-year old.

The simple answer is that goaltenders and defensemen are significantly harder to project than forwards. We can generally pick the best 4-5 forwards in a draft with a certain degree of certainty. That cannot be said about defenders and netminders. Since picks are so valuable, it’s especially painful to miss. Goaltenders in the first round are becoming increasingly rare, and that’s a very good thing. Defensemen in the top five can be just fine, but it’s going to take them longer than forwards to reach impact status as NHL players.

Forwards are both easier to project (more predictable) and are more immediate in their impact. The hardest thing in the game to do is score goals, therefore the offensive players (mostly forwards) have high value.

Development (generally) takes longer for those two positions while forwards can impact the game earlier on in their careers. 

Compete. It is used incorrectly too often. Loathe it.

-“Small sample size.” The number of games/shifts/situations should speak for itself. “In 24 games” or “in 25 attempts” etc etc.Don’t need to add that qualifier.

-“Knuckle dragger.”  People who use this term about tough guys/enforcers have never once looked a player in the eye in person and used that term to describe them. 

-“Book it.” If people could predict the future with 100 per cent accuracy, they’d be too busy filling out their lottery numbers and picking winners in Vegas to be overstating their opinion on a hockey website. Book it guys never come back to eat crow when their sure thing goes sideways.

CLASSY! My lord does that word need to die in a fire like five years ago. It’s basically become a catchall for someone doing something positive (or negative if we were to use classless). A player passes the puck to a teammate rather than scoring on the empty net himself? WHAT A CLASSY MOVE! A player throws a cheap shot in a scrum? WHAT A CLASSLESS PLAY BY A CLASSLESS INDIVIDUAL! No CLASS in that room over there!

I don’t know why it drives me so crazy but it does and I’d appreciate if you all stopped saying it, thank you.

“Compete” is a completely meaningless word that gets brought up when we don’t know what else to say. And the people who bring it up are really trying to say something else but they’re lacking the vocabulary or stones to say what they really mean.

It used to be time and space, nothing lately has irritated me.

Any sentence that ends with “in the room.” Whether a guy is good in the room, cancer in the room, crop dusts in the room, or any other variation you can think of. The story you heard from some guy that knows Taylor Hall doesn’t mean shit about how he acts around his teammates. We don’t know what happens in there. Enough already.

I eat the same breakfast probably 27 days a month. I love it. 
1 cup of plain greek yogurt. 
1 cup frozen blackberries. 

1/2 cup of bananas
1/3 cup All Bran buds. 
1 tsp of chia seeds

1 tbsp of walnut

1 tsp of Maple syrup 

Eggs.

Probably pasta. It’s my favourite food (just BARELY above pizza), it’s super easy to make, versatile, and I eat way too much of it at any given time.

Hamburgers. Love them.

Chicken.

Uh, is coffee a food? Coffee would easily be the calories that I ingest most. Beer maybe? I drink a lot of beer. If I can’t claim drinks then I would probably say tacos. We eat a lot of tacos at the Castle Milk. Oh, and we also eat a lot of pho/noodle soup/whatever you want to call it. 

Matt Greene. When he was traded to LA he kept his red pick up truck. Didn’t see the need to get a fancy “LA vehicle.” He is one of the funniest players I’ve come across, so he’d make the time go by fast, and he knows how to “rough” it. He could handle living on an Island.

A dessert island? I’d pass the time by making Georges Laraque eat banana splits and bread pudding instead of seaweed and crap like that. We’d laugh a lot.

I’m gonna go with Joe Thornton; he already has a Castaway-style beard, he’s still young and strong by societies standards (but HELLA OLD by NHL standards), he seems like he’d be fun to hang out with and I bet he could tell me hours and hours of stories from his time in the league, which would entertain me to no end. And then I could also definitively find out why they call him Jumbo, IFYOUKNOWWHATIMEAN!

Is that a dessert island or a desert island? Because if it’s a dessert island then Grant Fuhr and I could have a lot of fun. If it’s a desert island I should probably bring someone who might help me survive. I’m going with Brent Burns. He probably has some sick caveman survival skills.

Roberto Luongo. He is funny.

Brent Burns. He looks like he would be able to fend for himself as well as protect me from predators. I’ve watch enough survival shows to be able to handle the rest.