2015 NHL Draft: Winners And Losers From An Exciting Weekend

Mandatory Credit: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

The 2015 NHL Draft is officially over. What an exciting weekend it was! Lots of unexpected moves and trades were made, which led to most NHL mock drafts being thrown out the window. Teams came into this weekend looking to improve their team by any means necessary. Some might have taken different routes of doing so, but regardless met that objective.

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With every NHL draft, there are winners and losers. There are teams who come away having improved themselves the most. On the other hand, there are also teams that come away having not improved their teams or not impressing.

This year, I believe that there were a lot of winners, or at least teams that didn’t lose. There weren’t really many “losers”, per say. That speaks to the talent of this year’s NHL draft class.

In order to efficiently determine who are the winners and losers, we looked at the following criteria.

• What did each team do with the picks that they made?
• If they moved picks, did they get assets back and did they pay a reasonable price for those assets?
• Did they make their team better, whether that be in the present or the future?

Using that criteria, our thoughts were confirmed: a lot of teams improved themselves during the NHL Draft weekend. Present or future, it doesn’t matter, the purpose of the NHL Draft is to make your team better. Many teams did that this weekend. However, there were still teams that I don’t think improved themselves, or at least didn’t improve themselves as much as I believe that they reasonably could have.

Without further ado, here are our winners and losers from the 2015 NHL Draft!

Next: Winner: Islanders