Craig Billington, the vice president of hockey operations in an Avalanche front office about to undergo at least a minor restructuring, has been adamant that Colorado will be able to select an elite player with the third pick in the June 26-27 draft.
Other than that, he won’t go into detail about the possibilities.
To wit: Is there any chance of London Knights center John Tavares or Modo defenseman Victor Hedman sliding to No. 3? If, as expected, Tavares and Hedman still go 1-2, is Brampton Battalion center Matt Duchene the automatic choice at No. 3, or should others be considered?
The complicating development is that Duchene is “hot,” both in evolving predraft evaluations and on the ice. He’s having a strong playoff run with the Battalion and had a hat trick in the series-clinching Game 6 as Brampton beat the Belleville Bulls on Friday night to advance to the Ontario Hockey League championship series against the Windsor Spitfires.
A win in that series would send the Battalion to the Memorial Cup, the four-team championship tournament of the umbrella Canadian Hockey League that will determine the successor to the 2008 champion, the Spokane Chiefs.
Tavares’ Knights lost to the Spitfires in the Western Conference finals, so he’s done for the season.
There are common elements to all major-league drafts — I’ve covered three of the four, or all but MLB’s — and one of them is that the worst mistakes are made in the final re-evaluations as D-Day approaches. Teams too often can’t leave well enough alone, undercutting months and even years of scouting and information-gathering. Overreaction to such things as the Indianapolis combine and private workouts, for example, are major pitfalls in the NFL draft.
In this case, at least, Du- chene’s “rise” has to do with what he’s doing in games, not in shorts and T-shirt. The upcoming NHL combine in Toronto doesn’t involve on-ice work at all.
I also don’t claim to be an NHL draft “guru.”
Side note: I bring up the term because doesn’t it seem that all anyone one has to do these days is claim to be a draft “guru” and, voila, that’s what they are? In the media section at the NFL draft in New York, I once sat next to a “guru” long enough to conclude he was a terrific information-gatherer but couldn’t have diagramed a play or evaluated a tackle’s pass-blocking skills on his own. The information explosion since has changed the picture considerably, and some terrific scouts are entrepreneurs and not league or team employees. But I’m still convinced there’s a lot of bluffing involved in the public evaluations.
In this instance, I’ve seen the NHL top prospects only in brief clips, and no more. So all I’m saying is that I’m inclined to believe that NHL teams shouldn’t disregard the body of evidence and abandon long-held feelings about Tavares being the clear No. 1 in this draft. One of the enjoyable aspects of working in a major-junior hockey market — Portland, home of the Western Hockey League’s Winter Hawks — was running into NHL scouts I knew at games. I’d watch them mostly focus and take notes not on the biggest major-junior stars, who usually already had been drafted, but on the “eligibles” for the next draft. The scouting data now is even more voluminous.
The league’s Central Scouting final rankings have Tavares ahead of Duchene on the list of North American skaters, and while the respected Red Line Report has moved Duchene up, the other consideration is that none of us would even have mentioned those rankings if the private service had left Tavares No. 1.
Unless everyone is off-target, though, the Avs can’t foul this up.
Terry Frei covers the NHL. Contact: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
