Quoting: DoubleADoubleK
Just recently I researched these 241 pick deals, seems like the team moving down knew what they were doing and won by a landslide, while the team moving up was caught star gazing while listening to bad scouting advice! Busts everywhere, total crapshoot considering only 30/210 picks turn into nhlers. Kinda like armchair GMs overvaluation of hype of picks and prospects verses actual guarantees.
As bad the selection of Tyler Biggs was, the Leafs also had the 29th pick that June and picked Stuart Percy. Yikes.
My opinion of Burke was always very low as NHL GM. He's a television personality. He knows what a team should do behind a microphone but as Leaf GM...well you see the results.
Burke hired the the biggest amount of executives....at a high cost to the owners. IMO those executives only job was to tell Burke how smart he was and that all the Toronto fans and media were stupid.
Did Burke and these executives ever see a non NHL arena to evaluate players? Doubt it. No, I think they spend most of their days, dining and drinking at the Air Canada Centre paying homage to the the smartest man in the world, Brian Burke. (on Burke's orders) Few in any of those executives every worked in the NHL again. Burke only NHL job after that was president of the Flames. Didn't help the Flames either.
For player evaluation the owners of the Leafs would have been much better off, heeding advice from a forum like CapFriendly (it didn't exist then) than to pay for Burke and his buddies and their "work."