It's one of the best and most exciting times of the year. Draft time. Drafts are always incredibly fun to watch. For fans your team gets a new player for free essentially. You get a new young player that you can keep track of and hopefully that new player will help you achieve a ton of success in the future.
It's also fun to watch young athletes dreams come true. Most of the players drafted into pro sports have spent their entire lives dreaming of this very moment. Heck, a lot of people watching spent much of their lives dreaming of this very moment, only to realize that it won't ever happen. It's an incredibly hard step to reach and these young guys have done it.
This year Washington Capitals fans will have their sights set on pick number 17. Almost smack dab in the middle of the first round. This year that feels like a very tricky spot to be picking.
This year it seems we have tiers to the players who are in this draft. You have your no brainer number one pick, then you have picks 2-5 who will probably be pretty good. Then you have another range of 6-12 or 13 of players that might be good. Then it seems like everybody else.
To say it in a shorter way, this is not the deepest draft we've seen.
Deep draft or not, drafts are always a crapshoot. You can find a star at number 3 overall. That star might be at twenty-three. Or he could be a third rounder, or later. We just never know.
So who should the Capitals target this year at pick number 17?
Before I show you the three players I like the most I would like to point out the obvious. I do not know these prospects well. All I have done is days of reading and watching some videos of people who know a lot more than me on these prospects. I don't have that much information on these guys. I'm not going to be able to reveal much about these players to you. Today I'm only telling you what I like about what I've read about them. We'll be putting plenty of links of articles from people who know more about them, I highly encourage you to check these links out.
With that being said I'm focusing mostly on forwards here. If there is one thing that Capitals may need it might be a future replacement for John Carlson. I doubt the Caps get that at 17. If you want to get that you will probably have to trade up and to get that kind of guy I don't think a trade up is possible. We'll talk about defensemen that the Caps could get later. Today it's forwards.
Up first!