Always fun to see Rangers draft well 😁 Not just Jessiman but Malhotra, Novak, Blackburn and some nobody... oh boy. Malhotra wasn't a failure though, just did not make it in Rags. Blackburn would've been a good pick without that bad luck. The rest... What were they thinking? To everybody saying Montreal failed too, no they didn't. Kostitsyn had talent and a decent career. It's just that he is compared with the others and that's not fair. As there are an unusually high amount of Cups, individual trophies and likely Hall of Famers. Same with Zherdev who was decent but not great. Jessiman was the one true failure.
Edmonton was at least equally as bad. Even before Yakupov, they managed to pick players with attitude problems. As they picked both Rob Schremp and Jesse Niinimaki. Both had the skills to be stars in NHL. They lacked the will to do the work that was needed. Like Yakupov. IMO they are actually worse. Oilers drafted players with attitude problems, could've been avoided. Rangers either traded away their prospects (Malhotra), had bad luck (Blackburn) or did not gave them a real chance (Novak, Jessiman).
Well, at the time he didn't. He was very good powerforward and deserved that spot. But his career was short because of injuries. That's why it is so tricky to draft as I feel DiPietro is an example of a bad choice mostly because of bad luck. He really was promising. In my opinion the real failures are when you pick someone who has documented attitude problems. Like Yakupov, who was reportedly very cocky. Or Jesse Niinimaki, who was infamous for being talented but lazy. You can't predict injuries but you can predict when someone has the wrong attitude for the big league
apparently the Panthers wanted to draft Ovechkin, were told multiple times he was not in the draft pool that year, tried to anyhow, then settled with Horton
