First off, thanks for your thoughts. We didn't want to turn the thread into a discussion about just one player, but it looks like we still need to further clarify a few points. Hopefully somebody will find it worthwhile to see our thought process behind our rankings even if he ends up disagreeing with our overall assessment.
1. A key contention seems to be that we are placing a lot of emphasis on his pro performance. We are not. Things we saw in Boqvist's JUNIOR game over last 2 years (part of the reason why we didn't rank him as high as others even prior to this season) which we feared might pose challenges to him when playing against pros (or NHL caliber competition down the line) were so far confirmed in the games we saw of him playing against pros. Those issues aren't completely gone when he plays against juniors, but they don't jump out nearly as much, mainly because junior players aren't good enough for the most part to challenge him in that way.
2. Those issues are not strictly related to physical development. We feel like his intensity and level of engagement defensively and away from the puck are not at that high of a level. Something we've been seeing for more than a year. That doesn't mean, he won't make the NHL or be a good player, it's just an issue we saw that makes us wonder how that will affect his ultimate impact down the line at a pro-level. Those issues to us seem more related to mental attributes than to the need of adding more strength. That doesn't imply bad hockey IQ, either.
3. Our claim is that it is not automatic that an attribute like that gets much better with age. Of course that doesn't mean it's impossible either.
4. All of this plays into our ranking of him. We are trying to gauge all of this and that's what is reflected in our ranking. We mostly agree on your comment relative to talent but we would say the talent is also reflected in our ranking of Boqvist. For some that might still be too low, but that's probably a good example of why NHL teams rankings going into the draft can be so different.
5. With the Denisenko question we made, the implication was that we consider Boqvist as much of a pure skill guy as him. Ironically, Denisenko is the guy of the two who has occasionally shown more willingness to be more than a pure skill guy, though his success through tough situations/plays still varies at this point in time. Still, it would be hard for us to find something in Boqvist's game that would imply he is something "beyond" a pure skill player that Denisenko also doesn't have. You can say that Boqvist is smart and not just skilled, but the equal holds for Denisenko in our mind.
6. Denisenko started his season cold, but since the Plymouth tournament has been scoring at a rate that is more in line with his skill level, so that eased some of our concerns regarding his production.
Anyways, I hope this gives a better picture of where we're at. Obviously this can still change and it's possible that our current opinion on that might be proven wrong down the line too, but we always try to explain why we rank certain players the way we do and try not to take the easy way out with adjusting to "consensus". Obviously the place where we especially do that is inside our draft guide.
