Curt

Nothing is impossible, but I don’t think Martin even wants to be an NHL head coach.

He has a contract with Toronto which he needs to honor, so he can’t just quit. Buffalo would need to ask Toronto’s permission to interview him or to hire him. NHL teams often grant such permission if it’s going to be a promotion for the candidate, but yes, they do have the right to say no.

Far fetched, but I suppose it’s possible.

Beecher especially I like for Buffalo. I think he may be a bit overlooked due to being buried on that USNTDP team. Big, fast, nasty, with more puck skills and upside than you might realize at first glance.

The actual simple answer to your question, from the player group I was looking at, is Zherdev and Kostityn. I was looking only at players who: 1) Did not come to North America prior to their draft and 2) were highly regarded enough talents to justify a top-10 pick. So these are players who specifically did not go out of their way to come over at a young age and were considered super talented. So my thought process is that if they do not make it big (perennial All Star) in the NHL, they have incentive to go back to the KHL because they can actually make more money there. I'm not drawing any definite conclusions here, and if Podkolzin was on the board at #7 I may take him anyway, but it is something to consider. I'm not going to push this any farther, because people can sometimes get very touchy when talking about such things.

I’m just trying to think how I would feel if we drafted Pod, he came over after 3 years at 21, established himself as a 25-25-50 good top-6 winger, then he left for the KHL at 25/26. I would not be pleased, to put it lightly.

I would agree with your larger point. I’m ok with it though. I get the reasons. It’s not an especially attractive location, unless the team itself is very good. If this becomes a consistent winning team/organization, that could change things to an extent.

Trotz, Julien in the past couple years. but I guess it depends on the definition of 5-Star.

RESULTS: So, it was a little worse than I thought. I the past 20 drafts, 10 players out of Russia have been selected in top 10. Nichuskin and Kravtsov are the two most recent and are too young to draw any definite conclusions on. Of the other 8, 3 were basically busts in both the NHL and KHL (Svitov, Christov, Filatov). Of the remaining 5 who turned out to be pretty good, Zherdev and Kostityn left for the KHL at age 26, Kovalchuk left for the KHL at 29, Ovechkin and Malkin have remained in the NHL thus far with no signs of leaving. It’s actually not a great outlook for these highly drafted players out of Russia. It looks like unless they turn into one of the top 25 players in the league, they are going to jump back to Russia. Obviously, there are players drafted later who have come to and stayed in the NHL, but I wanted to look specifically at high end Russian prospects who did not come to play in North America prior to being drafted.

I guess you really never know. It will depend on how Sabres (and other teams) feel about him after interviews and all their background work. Are there examples of truly high end players, top-10 draft picks who have decided to just stay in Russia? I think it’s very uncommon. I might have do some digging on this.

Let him stay in Russia for 2 years. He will come over at age 20, NHL ready. I wouldn’t really worry about the “Russian Factor”, this guy could be an NHL star.

You talking about Taylor or Keefe? :)

Who said anything about a pick? Maybe they want to add the best #2C in the league, Sobotka.

Perhaps, it’s worth an ask, but I think he is committed there. It has got to be appealing for a coach to be able to advise on the building of his team from scratch.

I think I would fine with Tippett also, but I believe he is spoken for by Seattle.

Todd Richards, John Stevens, Mike Yeo, Jacques Martin

I wasn't trying to knock you specifically. Just saying we all (myself included) do a lot of speculating and story weaving because we really only know about 10% of what is actually going on.

Key phrase. We create lots of stories in our heads to fill in all the information that we don't know.

Also, we are definitely all doing this in the wrong thread. Discussions of trading vs keeping #7 should probably move over to the more relevant thread. Casey Mittlestadt doesn't want to hear all of this.

You can say the same thing about making trades. Its easier to say "make a good trade" than to actually do that. You can screw up a trade just as easily as you can screw up a draft pick.

The issue here is that Buffalo does not have enough organizational depth right now. Mostly because they drafted pretty terribly from like 2005 to 2015. For Buffalo to be a quality team, that organizational depth needs to be improved. There are multiple ways to build this up. The most common and sustainable way, is to draft well. It can also be done through shrewd trades/fleecing other teams in trades. It can also be supplemented by finding overseas (Pilut) or college (Rodrigues) FA gems. The best teams do a combination that involves all of these. So, Buffalo can trade #7 or draft at #7, but they better fleece someone in the trade or hit on the draft pick, otherwise things aren't going to get any better. Based on Buffalo's current status of, definitely not a contender, I would try to draft a good player.

If those two are gone, don't sleep on Krebs. I think I like him more than most. He has skating, speed, playmaking, can play C or W, solid 2-way game, universally acknowledged leadership qualities, just named captain of the Canadian U18 team. His junior team was very bad, so I don't think he gets the attention he deserves.

I agree with these two thoughts. You need need need to be able to skate well. Its just as important for the D as it is for the F's. Even a big defensive D with limited offensive upside needs to be at least an average skater to have a chance of being a top-4 D. In Botterill's 2 drafts, he has taken 7 D and only 4 F's. This is a good year for F's and I'd like to see Buffalo go forward-forward with these two 1st rounders. That being said, you have to wait and see who is there when your turn is up.

You are reaching. We don’t know what Botterill has or hasn’t done.

I think that you have unrealistic expectations for how quickly a head coach hiring process should play out.