StevenToddIves
Registered User
@StevenToddIves Pronman addressed why he had Fagemo as the Kings top prospect in his Q&A yesterday...
Like I said, I love Pronman. I just disagree with him a whole lot. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The idea that a winger with second line upside is the Kings best prospect just feels like a slight on some tremendous prospects over there. My Kings top 10 is more like:
1 Turcotte
2 Kaliyev
3 Vilardi
4 Kupari
5 Bjornfot
6 Madden
7 Thomas
8 Fagemo
9 Anderson
10 Anderson-Dolan
I would also say that the Kings top 10 (not including younger NHL-ers like Pronman does) is quite possibly the best in the entire NHL. That top 6 is just ridiculous, and that 7 through 10 would be a 2 through 5 on many NHL teams.
I read The Athletic religiously. They're the best hockey journalism source in the USA right now (not including Canadian sites). I also read Scott Wheeler religiously and I disagree with him on pretty much everything -- but again he's a terrific writer and researcher and I highly recommend him to any hockey fan. I think in the current (cough, cough) political ambiance in America we've somehow culturally come to a place where many people think that another person is "bad" because they have an opposite opinion. This is not true, especially in a burgeoning science, like the projection of sports prospects.
This is simply absurd. Scott Wheeler is worthy of our respect, as Corey Pronman is worthy of our respect. Disagreement is part of the fun when no one is an asshat about it! I'm coming out with my final rankings next week, and I know people will roll their eyes about how high I rank a Tristen Robins or how low I rank some player they like. To me, that's the fun of it, because prognostication is essentially asking for future hind-sight criticism, right?
In the end, I'll always be the guy who ranked Gurianov #9 when no one else had him in the first round, or who ranked Barzal #4 when no one else had him in their top 5. But I'll also be the guy who had (cough, cough) Nolan Patrick ranked over Nico Hischier.
The only physical threat I ever received as a working hockey writer was when I ranked Barzal at #4 and Dylan Strome at #5. Some guy wrote in that I was an idiot writing "click bait" and had no idea what I was doing to insult Strome that way. I wrote back that I loved Strome, I ranked him 5th overall out of nearly 300 eligible prospects! He then messaged me on Twitter to say that if he ever saw me on the street he was going to kick my ass. I didn't have the heart to tell him that most people would bet on the guy who bartended on 8th Avenue for 15 years in a scrap over a guy in a basement writing insults on hockey website message boards.
Ultimately, I just wrote this because I think it's interesting and fun to disagree, and I think that regardless of what certain people in the public eye say about it, I think it's healthy -- and if we listen to each other we can all learn from each other.