Appreciate your comments on Lindstrom. I've always enjoyed your comments on the Prospects forum and respect the opinions and the detailed explanations you've provided. I knew nothing about Lindstrom prior to the Draft but it got my attention earlier in this thread when you tweeted the Wings "got at #38 a better prospect than Brannstrom". Anything further that you'd like to add to that comparison of a highly-touted prospect vs. a much lesser-known prospect would be welcome.
Between Lindstrom and Kotkansalo, it strikes me the Wings got two D prospects who have some of the same attributes but are a little more physically mature/developed as Cholowski and Hronek. The defense prospect pool, with Saarijarvi also in the mix, is starting to look pretty good.
Thanks for the kind words.
As for that tweet/comment...it's mainly due to the fact that we were big fans of Lindstrom and not as high on Brannstrom. In fact, from what I've seen (and I leave the option that I missed someone open, it's hard to tell with so many rankings available these days) no other outlet seemed to be as high on Lindstrom or conversely as low on Brannstrom as us. Lindstrom was already in our 2nd round back on our preview ranking before the U18s in April. Considering he was a staff favorite, we couldn't find a reason for not pushing him even higher on our final rankings.
On the Brannstrom front, we knew we were lower on Brannstrom than probably anyone else and we stuck to what we saw in our viewings. He's actually one of the prospects in our draft guide that has a visual breakdown attached to his profile, which explains in-depth with concrete examples reasons for why we ranked him as we did.
And to answer your question about highly-touted prospect vs lesser known prospect. We believe you have to stick to your guns. If we feel like we're completely contrary to whatever the "general consensus" seems to be we only use that as motivation to dig in further with additional viewings to see whether we're not missing something. But we stick to what we see and that was the case with Lindstrom and Brannstrom. It has served us well in the past.