Because 1.7ppg against the QMJHL on a crappy team that he had to carry is better than 1.9ppg against the USHL on a historically good team with so much depth that top 10 picks were playing on the third line.
And you can't compare point per game rates directly across leagues. Saying "uh 1.9>1.7 so Hughes>Lafreniere" is ridiculous.
I mean if you consider this another way, Lafreniere has been the consensus top pick in a far better draft class.
A. It’s way too early to accurately say this is a far better class. It indeed looks good, and there’s a lot to be excited about, but we won’t have a good idea of how this class compares to rest until these guys have all played their draft seasons, and even then one could argue we really don’t know how good the draft class is until all of these players have finished their careers.
B. I don’t like the stats assessment either, but it’s hard to prove that Lafrienere’s situation is far more impressive than Hughes. I was looking for an article that compared them a while back and couldn’t find it, but they argued that Lafrienere is in a more Ideal situation for actual production because his QMJHL team ran everything through him and he played around 22 minutes a night, whereas Hughes was averaging just over 17 minutes a game on an NTDP team that rolled 4 lines consistently. Just another way of thinking about it. Again, I’m not one to agree with looking at stats as an arguement, as I believe stats without context are near garbage.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a Pro-scout, so my player evaluation’s are not only based on a few highlight clips and shift by shifts in YouTube, but also at times bad. That being said, I like to rely on the people who get paid to do this for their opinions, and I’m yet to find a single one that definitively says Lafrienere is a far superior prospect to Hughes. Some say Hughes is better, some say Lafrienere is better, but most say Lafrienere is roughly comparable to Hughes.
Also, it’s worth noting that Lafrienere is 2 weeks away from being eligible for the 2019 NHL draft, while Hughes Just turned 18 less than a month ago.