I’m hoping the team will be ready to come out of its rebuild in 2025 season since that is 3 seasons away so hopefully they can make some big free agency splashes before then

ASP over Leonard 100% IMO.

I mean, look at the roster you have together. 6 natural right wingers + Farabee (who if anything has looked better at RW than LW in the past) on this ACGM team, and that's after trading Konecny.

Meanwhile, the top 2 RHD on this team are a lefty who has openly said they prefer to play on the left side, and a player who really doesn't project to ever play higher than bottom pair, if he ever even makes the NHL.

Even if people like Leonard more as an overall prospect, at some point you have to take organizational need into account. ASP fills our biggest hole while Leonard just adds to a mess that already needs resolving as-is.

im not a big fan of drafting for need. look where that got us. drafting morin, sanheim, provorov, etc. i would be excited for both, or even someone like moore. rebuild will be a few years and they can go defense heavy whenever. they are pretty good at finding late forward gems (even recently like gendron and kaplan)

Yes. Next year's draft is deep for D. BPA always.

I'm generally not a fan of drafting for need myself, but in this case I think the gap between ASP and Leonard in terms of overall quality is close enough that there's no way they should go with the RW over the RHD. Moore I could be a bit more on board with since he plays Center, but even then I have my reservations as to if he's good enough to warrant 7OA.

I guess the big thing for me here is that I don't agree about just "going defense heavy when they see fit". RHD prospects are few and far between and generally take longer to develop, and it really is a bad idea to just assume "we'll find them later". For example, I keep seeing people say "next year is the year to go RHD, that class is D heavy!". The problem there is you basically have Levshunov who should probably land around 2 or 3, and Mews who belongs in the 9-12 range. Say Mews has a mid draft season and his stock lowers further than that. Next thing you know, you're basically stuck between reaching for Mews a ton around the 5-7 range (where I suspect the Flyers will end in draft positioning), or desperately trying to trade up for Levshunov (which teams seldom to never trade down).

Desperate attempts at filling RHD via trade and FA are one of the primary reasons we're in the mess now. They absolutely need to address it via draft this time around, and that likely means taking a risk on a guy a bit sooner than he should go in the draft (even though I think ASP belongs around 7 anyways)

Would tag you in response above, not gonna retype that lol

im fine with whatever. its not atypical for teams to get good defensemen later on in their rebuild, like the devils, sabres, rangers, etc. devils and rangers got siegenthaler and fox for a 2nd and 3rd total. thats what we gave up for TDA lol. they just need to be smarter than they were in the past

That's very fair too. Like you said, just going to fall on Briere to actually make good decisions

I could see a team sending a late 1st for Laughton