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Pittsburgh's draft focused on defense help
June 24, 2017, 2:17 PM ET [57 Comments]
Ryan Wilson
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The Pittsburgh Penguins flipped draft picks with the St. Louis Blues in the Ryan Reaves trade and today they had the opportunity to use the #51 pick on a defenseman from the QMJHL




There were no readily available Youtube clips of Mr. Lauzon. Here is his Hockeydb page



So now that we are all experts on the player let's break this down.

His draft ranking was near the 150's and the Penguins selected him at 51. Rankings are what they are, these players all have low success rates as it is. The chances for future NHL success are known to be lower with players who don't generate offense at lower levels of hockey. In 135 QMJHL games he has four goals and 34 points. Pittsburgh is banking on this player being a defensive wizard. Personally, I believe you should chase offensive generation when drafting and not defensive suppression. One is harder to find and more valuable and the odds of landing the pick are the same.

Players who can generate offense are also the ones that can create controlled exits and entries which are very important and drive success in hockey. To paraphrase Josh Weissbock, using offensive production as a future predictor of success is about probability. It isn't an automatic destiny.




Given that there isn't much offense in Lauzon's game his NHL ceiling would be a Brian Dumoulin kind of player. Good at the entry and exit stuff but doesn't show up much on the scoresheet. The problem with this is that even Brian Dumoulin put up 83 points in 123 games at Boston College.

I had similar reservations with Pittsburgh taking Connor Hall last year. Unfortunately, for Hall he was injured much of the 2016-17 season so we do not really have a growing sample to evaluate him on at the present moment.

Lauzon did win the QMJHL award for best defensive defenseman though. So did somebody else




I wouldn't get too excited by that coincidence. There no evidence suggesting they are similar in any capacity



Time will tell as it does with all draft selections.

Pittsburgh's next pick was for another defenseman




Cool birth date.

He is one of the youngest players in the draft and in the USHL he was able to put up a little bit of offense



He even had a Youtube clip.



I like the idea of Phillips better than Lauzon based on the concept I outlined above.

Phillips will be heading to the University of Minnesota to play for none other than Mike Guentzel.

Lower levels of hockey don't have the same public information available for analysis so the best predictor of future success we have is offense. We'll see how each of these two players do in 2017-18.

Here are the other picks










Use Hockeydb and Youtube at your own discretion.



Thanks for reading!
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