Badgers in the Upcoming Draft

In his post on the Badger Blog, Baggot indicates that 9 Badgers could be chosen in the upcoming draft and that 2 (Gardiner and Goloubef) may go in the 1st round. He also reports that 5 Badgers are in the top 100 in the latest RLR report.

I'm an idiot when it comes to these things and don't know how often the RLR comes out. So I don't know if there were RLR rankings in May. But I do have the RLR rankings from April. Anyway, here are June's RLR rankings, with April's rankings in parentheses:

29 (29) - Jake Gardiner (D '08 recruit)
47 (81) - Cody Goloubef (D)
55 (90) - Justin Schultz (D '09 recruit)
84 (89) - Matt Thurber (F '08 recruit)
89 (85) - Tyler Barnes (F '09 recruit)

Goloubef and Schultz moved up quite a bit. Schultz's ranking surprised me a little bit given DPlaya's combine report, but I suppose he's got a year to work on his conditioning.

In it's draft analysis, RLR had 3 Badgers (Thurber, Barnes, Wiercioch) listed as mid-round sleepers and 2 Badgers (Wiercioch, Stepan) listed as top underrated players.

And what's not to like about this?

Gardiner was among RLR's top skaters available, while Goloubef and Thurber were listed among those with the most natural hockey sense.

On Goloubef: "Thinks the game beautifully and sees plays developing before anyone else.''

On Thurber: "Best in the draft at playing without the puck.''

The Goloubef quote really makes me smile. As does the Thurber quote -- IIRC, Eaves said somthing similar about Thurber in the most recent video preview.