Abel to Yzerman

Abel to Yzerman

Wants And Needs For The Detroit Red Wings

04/07/2019 at 7:49pm EDT

from Arthur J. Regner of the DetroitRedWings.com,

...there is a consensus the top three players on the draft board, American center Jack Hughes, Finn right wing/center Kaapo Kakko and Russian right wing Vasili Podkolzin are in a class by themselves.

Red Wing officials have been adamant all season they'd be ecstatic if they were slotted in one of the top three spots in the first round.

Since the Red Wings finished with the fourth worst record in the NHL they have a 9.5 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick and a 28.8 percent chance of procuring a top 3 pick in the 2019 draft. They cannot fall lower than three spots in the lottery, but history has not been kind to the Wings in the draft lottery.

Detroit has fallen in both year's its participated in the draft lottery, dropping two spots from seventh to ninth in 2017 and last year they fell one slot from fifth to sixth.

It appears the Red Wings did just fine with their picks selecting Michael Rasmussen ninth overall in 2017 and Filip Zadina with the sixth pick in 2018.

Similar to last season, a puck moving-moving, offensive-minded defenseman and a supremely skilled forward top the Red Wings' wish list heading into the draft on June 21 and 22 in Vancouver.

After Hughes, Kakko and Podkolzin there isn't a definitive pecking order of how the rest of the top 12 to 15 picks will play out, but here's a list of 15 players that have the strongest possibility of having their name called by Detroit...

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Welcome to Abel to Yzerman, a Red Wing blog since 1977. No other site on the internet has better-researched, fact-laden and better prepared discussions than A2Y. Re-phrase: we do little research, find facts and stats highly overrated and claim little to no preparation. There are 19 readers of A2Y. No more, no less. All of them, except maybe one, are juvenile in nature. Reminding them of that in the comment section will only encourage them to prove that.

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