"It's the way the cards fell," Holmgren said on Saturday, recapping the Flyers' draft. "You don't draft by need. Not very often can you go out of order, at least that's how I see it.
"Would we like to have drafted more defensemen? Yes, I guess we probably would have. But I don't know that it's a big deal. You can't go out of order. We don't veer from our list very often, if ever. That's just the way we've always acted."
By all accounts, that's what happened with their No. 8 overall pick on Friday night when they selected center Sean Couturier just 24 hours after trading away Jeff Carter and Mike Richards because of an overload at the position.
The Flyers never thought Couturier - who was at one point ranked the No. 1 overall prospect by scouts and many assumed would at least go in the top five - would still be on the board.
"We got a big center in the first round that we all really liked," Holmgren said. "The guys we drafted from the third through the seventh round, we got bigger. I think we've added skill and competitiveness."
The same theory applied for fourth-round pick Marcel Noebels from Germany. He finished ranked 49th among skaters in the final rankings but fell to the Flyers at No. 118 overall.
Other picks, like Czech forward Petr Placek - out of the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut - are more of a projection. Placek, 18, is set to attend Harvard this fall and the Flyers will have all 4 years to watch him develop. The pick spent on Placek may or may not play out in the team's favor but they will have more time to watch him than almost any other player they have picked because his draft status, unlike junior players, doesn't expire because of the NCAA.
It's one of the reasons that Holmgren says the draft is as big a "crap shoot" as there is in sports. Teams spend the entire season guessing what one particular player may look like 3 or 4 years down the road.
