206: Defensemen, Kieran Ruscheinski
Remember the very end of the last slide where I said it’s not a bad idea to gamble on speed and skill, even if the player is undersized? The Habs did that with Harvey-Pinard, and then five picks later they did the exact opposite with Kieran Ruscheinski.
If you haven’t already guessed, this guy was on literally zero mock drafts. He might have been a sleeper in the WHL mock drafts, but he was certainly not on any NHL mock drafts.
He is not a small, skilled forward like Harvey-Pinard. In fact, he is the opposite, a huge defensive defenseman. The Calgary, Alberta native is 6’6″ tall which would make him among the largest Canadiens in the organization already.
The strange thing about this pick is that Ruscheinski was drafted out of the Alberta Midget AAA Hockey League. This almost never happens. There’s reaching and then there’s going off the board and then there’s drafting an unknown and then there’s dipping into the Calgary Midget AAA market for an NHL pick.
I mean, he did win the MVP of the league and is taller than Shea Weber, so there has to be something here, right? Ruscheinski is off to play in the BCHL next season with the Salmon Arm Silverbacks and will likely head to NCAA the year after that.
It’s a project for sure. I’ve never heard of a player being taken from a Midget league, so we will have to wait and see if Bergevin and Timmins know more than anyone else when it comes to Ruscheinski.
In fact, their last four picks were all players that were way off the board. It seems no one else had the quartet ranked at all. It will take some time, but the last four players taken by the Montreal Canadiens in this year’s draft will either become a huge question mark surrounding the management team, or prove them to be geniuses for finding value where no one else was looking.