-This marks the one-year anniversary for Eye on the Sens. Thanks to all my readers and twitter followers. I also want to thank Black Aces‘ Jeremy Milks and Jared Crozier at Senshot for including a link to the site, Peter Raaymakers and Amelia L for occasional mentions on The Silver Seven, Owen Bourns who invited me to write for Sens Nation, the moderators at HFboards who let me post links there for awhile, and various other bloggers who have commented here over the past twelve months (Lyle Richardson from Spector’s Hockey, Ian Altenbaugh at Hockey’s Future, and worsteverything at Welcome to Your Karlsson Years).
-As widely reported, Erik Karlsson won the Norris trophy and Daniel Alfredsson won the King Clancy award. As I’ve said before I don’t really care about the awards themselves, but I’m happy for the two Swedes nonetheless.
-It’s been re-confirmed that the Sens have qualified all their RFA’s except Craig Schira (so including Nikita Filatov despite his KHL contract); this was reported weeks ago, but apparently rumours about Filatov have been floating around since.
–Tim Murray talked about how he expects the three top blueline prospects (Mark Borowiecki, Eric Gryba, and Patrick Wiercioch) to step up next season, “There’s always somebody coming behind you. It’s a cruel game. If your turn comes and you’re not ready for it, somebody else is taking your spot. They’re going to get a turn here shortly and they better grasp it.” Murray also talked about the draft saying “We’re not convinced this is a great draft. The teams that have 11 or 12 picks say it’s a great draft and if we thought it was a great draft, it wouldn’t be hard to get more picks. We probably aren’t going to do that. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and in my estimation, it’s an average draft. There are some teams that think it’s a decent draft and there are other teams that don’t. So you have potential partners there in the fact that some teams will want picks and some teams will be happy to give up picks (and say) why don’t we wait until next year, when we like that draft a little better. So yeah, I think there could be a little moving and shaking tomorrow.”
–Pierre Dorion just keeps talking about the draft. There’s not much new, but “You’re right, there’s not the ‘wow’ factor this year but I still feel personally, and I know my group of scouts feel the same way, come Saturday night when we’ve made seven selections, I think we’ll be very happy with the product that we’ve come away with.” He also talked a little about Daniel Altshuller and Francois Brassard who came to Ottawa, “both good goalies. I would say Daniel is a bit bigger physically. Francois is skinnier. Daniel might be a bit better technically. Francois might be a bit quicker. But they’re both good guys and good goalies and will have a chance to have good NHL careers down the road.”
-Here are my draft predictions for Ottawa. Speaking of the draft, Brian Costello at THN has borrowed the basic part of my draft analysis approach to produce a top-30 list (I’m sure the cheque is in the mail), although he doesn’t explain exactly how he’s blended the five lists he’s using (THN’s, Bob McKenzie’s, ISS, McKeens, and Future Considerations; or so he implies those are the sources, but it’s not explicitly stated) and come up with this (differences with my list are in brackets):
1 Nail Yakupov, RW
2 Filip Forsberg, RW
3 Ryan Murray, D
4 Alex Galchenyuk, C
5 Mikhail Grigorenko, C (7)
6 Griffin Reinhart, D (5)
7 Matt Dumba, D (6)
8 Morgan Rielly, D
9 Jacob Trouba, D (10)
10 Teuvo Teravainen, LW (9)
11 Cody Ceci, D
12 Radek Faksa, C
13 Hampus Lindholm, D (16)
14 Sebastian Collberg, RW (19)
15 Olli Maatta, D (14)
16 Derrick Pouliot, D (13)
17 Brendan Gaunce, C
18 Zemgus Girgensons, C (15)
19 Matthew Finn, D (20)
20 Slater Koekkkoek, D (18)
21 Thomas Wilson, RW
22 Andrei Vasilevski, G (24)
23 Tomas Hertl, C
24 Pontus Aberg, LW (22)
25 Brady Skjei, D
26 Colton Sissons, RW (27)
27 Scott Laughton, C (26)
28 Malcolm Subban, G (30)
29 Nicolas Kerdiles, LW (35)
30 Stefan Matteau, LW (32)
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