I guess the answer is that the year is different than 2005. Crosby couldn't have been surpassed by Ryan nor Pouliot even in speculation. You know the funny part of 2005. The top three propably should have contained this one Slovenian guy named Kopitar, but since he was playing in Europe against pro's, it was harder to put his stats into perspective with the north american ones. But Kopitar was the first European taken, the best one from europe. In 2006 the best European was Nicklas Backstrom, who in hindsight wouldn't even have been a bad pick at #1. The thing with these guys is that Barkov has been considerably more impressive. So now try to somehow put that in perspective with the North American ones. I'd say it is close to impossible.
What I liked about Craig Button's lists on TSN, was that he always said something like "But come the draft day, any of these guys could go number one". He wasn't saying his list is how it will go. It was just how he think it could go, and when these guys were too close to tell, he told he wasn't sure about the order. He just had to make a guess. Button is propably the only North American media person who has said he wouldn't be surprised to see Barkov going #1. But TSN polled the scouts and McKenzie said one of the scouts had Barkov above both Mackinnon and Drouin. So it has been said months ago already that there are guys who rank it this way. What that propably means is that they are very close, or "in the same tier" so it is possible to have differing opinions of the subject. Now, why was Barkov "consensus" #4 on all the lists. It might be, that when prospects are in the same tier it is hard to tell them apart, people like to try to rank them anyway. It becomes an argument of ignorance, people in the end are ready to shout out red faced their truth to those that disagree. Then again it might be that when there is one list that had these prospects in this order, "maybe I can use their educated opinion as mine since I really can't tell who is better than who, I haven't seen all of their games to compare them.". This leads to a group think where all the obvious ones are ranked "independently", and all the hard parts of the draft are in the same order since it only needs the first ranking for the other rankings to lean on it.
But in the end, my guess is that Barkov, on average, is ranked fourth among the head scouts as McKenzies draft ranking was based on a poll. That doesn't still mean that Barkov is a Benoit Pouliot, and Mackinnon is a Sidney Crosby. Mackinnon and Barkov are much closer than people here on these boards want to think. "AINEC!"
