Article content continued

TSN draft expert Craig Button predicts the Oilers will take Dubois at fourth. He sees Tkachuk sliding to 6th, with big centre Logan Brown taken fifth overall.

So a team looking for either a solid centre or top-line winger might well be tempted to trade with the Oilers for the fourth overall pick.

The top forwards are uniformly rated higher than the top d-men in this year’s draft, but three CHL defencemen are seen as being Top 10 picks and we can compare their scoring as well. Tkachuk ranks eighth overall against other previous top-scoring forwards, while OHL d-man Mikhail Sergachev ranks ninth for d-men, behind players who have all proven to be good-to-excellent NHLers.

The young Russian also has good size and toughness. Button has him going 10th, behind Olli Juolevi, but Sergachev averaged 0.85 points per game this year, while Juolevi on the powerhouse London team was at 0.74 per game. If the Oil want to take a d-man, it looks like they could drop four or five spots in the draft and get one of Sergachev, Juolevi or Jakob Chychrun, the top-rated d-men.

A few final thoughts on this draft lottery:

— Fans in Winnipeg, Toronto and Columbus are all long-suffering. In fact, the Oilers don’t have much on any of them when it comes to suffering. So congratulations to them on the good luck their teams had in the draft.

— The best moment of the draft was the sour look on Brian Burke’s face when Winnipeg shot ahead of Calgary in the draft.

— The onus is now on Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli to make the right moves. So far he’s made a number of very good moves, a few OK ones and a few stinkers. For Chiarelli and the Oilers the next few months are crucial. He’s now had a year to watch and assess this team, to see what is working and what needs fixing. He can assess how well his own signings and trades have done, and cut his losses there if he must.

— The good news is with a stagnant cap and an expansion draft likely coming up in 2017, some teams will be forced into moving players they might otherwise have liked to keep, simply because their contracts don’t fit or they would be lost anyway in the expansion draft. It’s up to Chiarelli to target those pinched and cornered teams and get the most he can with the cap space the Oilers have in relative abundance right now.