Yeah. Brady is so good, man.

97 points in 157 games -29 .... yep Sens suck but Tkachuk still a good player! lol

Anyone who says no has no business ever sharing an opinion.

Yep.

Of course, but I don't blame them. We needed Kotkaniemi more than we needed Brady at the time.

yes, they would be better if they replaced a worse player with a better one

it was a terrible call then that looks even worse now

I usually ignore you and your never-ending pessimism, but I'll answer that one,

Jonathan Drouin was our 1C at the time, alternating with the likes of Paul Byron, a past his prime Tomas Plekanec and a 3rd line caliber Phillip Danault. Oh, and we didn't have Nick Suzuki at the time. In his last ranking before the draft, TSN’s Bob McKenzie ranked Kotkaniemi fifth among eligible players. It was a reach of two picks at best, but the management opted for him as he was widely regarded as the best center of the draft. Brady Tkachuk is the better player, but once again, he is not what we needed. If you look at this draft's top 10 picks, Hayton, Zadina, Boqvist, Kravtsov, Bouchard, Wahlstrom are all not more established than Kotkaniemi.

Here’s some question
If we had tkachuk do we sign toffoli?
Do we trade for Anderson?
Also people overvalue tkachuk a lot. He is definitely better than kk but he’s a 2 line winger. He hasn’t improved much from year to year. At this time I’d still take kk for because he’s a centre. Tkachuk is better but doesn’t make this team that much better

Yes!

That's really not the mentality you should draft with though, imo. If they just effed up and had KK as the highest on their draft board, then that's more forgivable to me than if they thought Tkachuk was the better player with the higher ceiling and still chose Kotkaniemi.

I'll repeat my answer :

Jonathan Drouin was our 1C at the time, alternating with the likes of Paul Byron, a past his prime Tomas Plekanec and a 3rd line caliber Phillip Danault. Oh, and we didn't have Nick Suzuki at the time. In his last ranking before the draft, TSN’s Bob McKenzie ranked Kotkaniemi fifth among eligible players. It was a reach of two picks at best, but the management opted for him as he was widely regarded as the best center of the draft. Brady Tkachuk is the better player, but once again, he is not what we needed. If you look at this draft's top 10 picks, Hayton, Zadina, Boqvist, Kravtsov, Bouchard, Wahlstrom are all not more established than Kotkaniemi.

drafting for positional need is dumb. It's always dumb and this is a primary example of it. It was incredibly obvious to anyone who knew anything about the draft and the Habs needs that drafting a guy who might could maybe be a 1C in 5 years over more skilled better players was a bad idea.
Now, here we are 3 years later and people who knew that are correct and people who blew all that "we need to draft a guy who has a 5% shot at being a 1C because we need a 1C" smoke are wrong and you're going all hindsight. So no, it was bad then and it is bad now.

the mental gymnastics some people go through to justify drafting for need, which has proven time and time again as a bad idea, is frankly mind boggling.

In the short term yes Brady makes the team better but in the long term KK still has the ability to become the better player. He has not even scratched the surface of his potential. We saw how good he can be in the playoffs yet at 20 he still has room to grow.

you needed the best player available, your GM blew that pick because Tkachuk was the obvious better by 99% of scouts and draft boards. It's really that simple. The only reason KK is more established is because the Habs were so desperate for him to make it that they jammed him into the league way too early.

That's kind of irrelevant to what I said though. Drafting for need is a bad idea, imo, is what I was trying to get across and you're just reiterating that they drafted for need.

If the Habs hadn’t picked Kotkaniemi, they probably would have picked Zadina or Hayton. There were some questions on whether Tkachuk could score at the NHL level at the time.

Center isn't just a need, it's what you base your franchise around. The whole organization was looking for "the" 1C since Vincent Damphousse. Tkachuk instead of Kotkaniemi, with no centers to play with wouldn't have been much better, belive me.

There were bigger questions that kk could score at an nhl level

I mean yeah but you're pretty deep on the wings already

I understand the value of the Center position and it doesn't change my opinion. Kotkaniemi, while a Center he may be, was not expected to be "the" 1C for anyone who drafted him. Selecting him with that expectation was in vain.

If they couldn't find Tkachuk a Center to play with, that's their own separate failure (Didn't the Suzuki trade take place like two months after that draft anyways?). Tkachuk still provides more value than Kotkaniemi and if they really felt that they still needed a C rather than Tkachuk, they very likely could have flipped him for a higher caliber Center than Kotkaniemi.

They didn't get the most value out of the pick, and that's pretty much the end of it. It happens; looks like things have turned out okay for them regardless.

Yep, and it's much easier to trade or sign a 2C (KK's highest upside) than it is a 1W (tkachuk's current ability). And if you some how end up with way too many good wingers you can trade the ones you dont need for a young C that is probably better than KK.

Yeah, but this is about if they heeded that red flag, and didn’t choose KK, they would have probably heeded the same red flag for Tkachuk, and gone with the safer pick in Zadina.

maybe, but that's another debate over if they should have taken Tkachuk. It's just that if they headed one guy who was ranked as the clear top 3 for most of the year and not a guy who snuck into the top 5 just at the draft, well that doesnt say much for their draft decisions.