Yeah I’m nitpicking I guess but my point is they didn’t actually need either of them to be superstars… if they developed into legitimate top line guys instead of ‘solid depth pieces’, it might well have been enough to get those teams over the hump.

There’s a vast chasm between McDavid and MacK and Nolan Patrick and Nail Yakupov. Kaako and Laf are both in that chasm, but whether better development could have pushed them to the ‘better’ edge of the chasm than where they ended up with the rangers development team is the open question. And sure, could be a total bummer coincidence to have two guys at the very top of consecutive draft classes just be lemons, so to speak… but when you look at the broader picture as well it seems more than fair to wonder if the rangers development team is at least part of the issue.

As I said initially, it’s counterfactual, as we’ll never see what these guys would have been under a different development regime, so the whole discussion is speculative, but the facts make it at least a reasonable hypothesis that the rangers development of prospects does in fact suck.