We're two days away from the Sabres taking the podium in Ottawa and making two first-round selections in the annual NHL Entry Draft (barring any trades of course).
Go to this link to see the Sabres' past draft classes. You can really see how this franchise was built with great drafts in the '70s and how it fell apart with plenty of lousy ones in the '80s and '90s. Some of the best ones I see:
1971: (Rick Martin, Craig Ramsay, Bill Hajt)
1972: (Jim Schoenfeld, Larry Carriere, Peter McNab)
1974: (Lee Fogolin, Danny Gare, Derek Smith and the unforgettable Taro Tsujimoto)
1975: (Bob Sauve, Ken Breitenbach, Terry Martin, Gary McAdam, Don Edwards)
1979: (Mike Ramsey, Lindy Ruff, Jacques Cloutier, Gilles Hamel, Alan Haworth)
1982: (Phil Housley, Paul Cyr, Dave Andreychuk)
1983: (Tom Barrasso, Adam Creighton, John Tucker, Daren Puppa, Christian Ruuttu, Uwe Krupp)
1997: (Mika Noronen, Henrik Tallinder, Maxim Afinogenov, Brian Campbell),
You see the potential from drafts in this decade like 2006 (including Dennis Persson, Jhonas Enroth, Mike Weber and Felix Schutz), 2005 (Phillippe Gogulla, Chris Butler, Nathan Gerbe) and 2004 (Drew Stafford, Michael Funk, Andrej Sekera, Patrick Kaleta). So there's certainly hope for this weekend with the Sabres owning three of the top 44 picks.
What classes do you like? In the name of Morris Titanic and Jiri Dudacek, what years on the list make you cringe?
---Mike Harrington
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NHL Entry Draft
