It's interesting looking back guys who were not considered great prospects at the time but ended up being good players and trying to figure out why you were wrong.
I didn't have Wood ranked very highly. He was a 4th round pick who after being drafted went back to play two years of high school hockey at 18 and 19. He had one pretty good year at BC and then immediately went pro. It was really tough to evaluate him because there was really just that one season at BC to go on. And it's always tough to evaluate guys who are physically mature early and dominate lesser leagues.
Bratt was kind of in a similar position where he played one season at AIK and then immediately won an NHL roster spot. Some people had identified him as a pretty talented player, and had he played a full season in London like he was supposed to he probably would have climbed up the prospect rankings in a hurry. But we never got to see productive prospect Bratt climbing up the depth charts, we got to see a scrawny little kid playing in Sweden and then suddenly he's on the top line with Taylor Hall.
Sharangovich, there's definitely a trend that becomes visible in hindsight. He scored 0.25 P/G his first season in Albany, then 0.44 P/G his second season, to 0.74 P/G in the KHL. There's a strong progression trend showing that this player is improving. I thought he had a good chance to make the team and be a decent bottom-6 guy this season but I was certainly blown away by just how good he was. The turnaround time from just another prospect to legit NHL guy was shockingly fast but he had been showing us growth and talent for some time. But really - the prospect rankings were accurate at the time, maybe bump him up a couple of spots but no one in their right minds should have been ranking him top-5 or anything like that.
You could throw Henrique in there as well. Two good but not amazing seasons in junior after being drafted, one pretty good AHL campaign in 2011, and then all of a sudden Zajac gets injured and he's getting 50 points as a rookie. Reasons to be optimistic, but when the switch flipped it happened real quick.
So these guys went from average/mediocre prospects to NHL players very quickly. And I think it was mostly a question of opportunity. We didn't really get to see a ton of progression, they had one or two years of truly measurable growth and then, boom, NHL. This path to the NHL is very hard to predict because you never know when that "Aha!" moment moment will occur. These players breaking out all makes sense in hindsight but at the time it always seems like a surprise.