When Dylan McIlrath was selected 10th overall in the 2010 NHL draft by the New York Rangers, it was with the belief that he was going to be a high-end shutdown defenceman and intimidating physical presence, the kind of player every team wishes it had to put in a matchup role against another club’s star.
Instead, he ended up playing just 38 games in New York. His career with the team came to an end this week when it traded him to the Florida Panthers in exchange for not very much. But while there’s a temptation to harangue the Rangers for their selection and subsequent development of the player, the McIlrath story is just one chapter of a much larger tome.
The fact is that the first round of the 2010 draft is chalk full of blown picks spent on defencemen.
It’s inevitable that some mistakes will be made when drafting 18-year-olds, but the interesting thing about the 2010 draft is that it doesn’t appear the big errors were as much a result of poor assessment as they were clouded vision. Drafting teams knew what these players were; the problem was that they didn’t ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
How the Defencemen of the 2010 NHL Draft Class Became a Cautionary Tale
November 11th, 2016 by Jonathan Willis Leave a reply »
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