POLL: Grade The Sabres 2016 Draft

The 2021 draft has come and gone and the Buffalo Sabres now have a double handful of shiny new players who are probably just names to a lot of us right now, but hopefully a few of them will develop into NHL players over the coming years, maybe even a couple of them into NHL stars and All Stars.

But that’s part of the problem with the draft (and also part of the appeal) because for the most part we won’t know for a few more years whether any of these kids will ever play in the NHL at all. It’s like Schrödinger’s draft — we really don’t know for sure if it’s a good draft or a bad draft right now.

So how about going back a few years to 2016 then? We drafted a total of ten players that year, and of that ten, four have played in the NHL, and two — Rasmus Asplund and Brett Murray — played with the Sabres last year. These players are still only about 23 years old, so there may still be time for late bloomers to blossom, but their springtime is starting to run out and we should have a pretty good idea of who they are and who they’ll become by now.

To refresh your memory, here’s the Sabres 2016 draft class:

Alexander Nylander

Rasmus Asplund

Cliff Pu

Casey Fitzgerald

Brett Murray

Philip Nyberg

Vojtech Budik

Brandon Hagel

Austin Osmanski

Vasily Glotov

So what do you think? What grade do you give the 2016 draft now that a few years have passed? And what do you think the future holds for Rasmus Asplund and Brett Murray?

Thanks for voting! And feel free to expand on your answer down in the comments.

Grade The 2016 Draft