Pronman definitely has his quirks, and sometimes gets rather ridiculous with how far he takes his evaluation idiosyncrasies. But, in large, I kinda agree with this point from Pronman. Obviously you don't apply it equally to every prospect you evaluate, and there's definitely room for poised, cerebral defensemen in the NHL today. But it's awfully hard to pick those players out as prospects, and many of them showed a lot more offensive talent as prospects than they carried into their NHL game. It's difficult to figure out which defensemen are going to retain their poise when presented with the game played at NHL speed, and it often takes a fair bit of NHL seasoning to accomplish this (resulting in a decent chunk of later bloomers among these types of D). This is part of the reason I've tended to be less optimistic in my projections of Lucas Johansen than many around here (although not nearly to the extent of one poster
). Ryan Murray was heralded as the prototype 2-way D as a prospect, and it's essentially taken him until he was 25 to move beyond the bottom pairing in Columbus. In juniors, ME Vlasic was an offensive D and PPQB, but he evolved into the poised shutdown type in the NHL. You see some hits on guys without great pre-draft offensive numbers when they come from outside the CHL, like Jaccob Slavin, Brett Pesce, and Mattias Ekholm. But all of them were later draft picks, which tends to demonstrate the point that it's hard to pick out these players as prospects. And a lot of prospects heralded for their hockey sense, positioning, and two-way play at the time of their draft ended up not panning out (thinking of guys like Tyler Cuma, Tim Erixon, Simon Despres, Stuart Percy, Mark Mitera) or having marginal value (Derek Forbort, Cody Ceci).
I don't think Pronman is saying poised defensive D don't have a place in the NHL, only that he doesn't rank them highly because it can be so difficult to project which ones are hits and which ones are misses.