In what is a very, very deep NHL draft, it's not that bad a situation to be out of the top five picks. The Minnesota Wild, with the seventh overall pick in the draft, will have their pick of all sorts of top prospects.
According to the Star Tribune, some of the best that will be available to the Wild are going to be defensemen, with four or five differently skilled ones potentially topping the draft board:
The Wild, picking seventh, should have its pick of four or five high-end defensemen, and they are all very different.
Griffin Reinhart has all the tools. Mathew Dumba: a big hitter with the big shot. Morgan Rielly: great skater. Cody Ceci: offensive whiz.
And Jacob Trouba will put you right through the glass.
Defense was a bit of a problem for the Wild last season at times, and they made a lot of moves to try and improve it. Teams like the Buffalo Sabres with Tyler Myers proved that a big, young defenseman can make all the difference in the world for a squad, so in such a deep defensive draft it seems perfectly logical for the Wild to go D on Friday night.
With so many options available, the selection the Wild make may just come down to what type of guy they're looking for. Of course, there's no guarantee that a defenseman will be the one taken in a draft with so much talent on all sides, as Wild Assistant GM Brent Flahr reminds us:
"If you look at the [Mikael] Granlund draft in 2010, that was the one time where we clearly needed skill up front and we were aggressive on that," Flahr said. "We knew even if we went by a defenseman, we had to get skill for the organization at forward.
"Now we're at a point where you can say we need defensemen, but you still have to take the best player. A lot of these players are a year or two away, sometimes three or four, from being impactful players."
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