I fully understand any Devils fans wanting Jiricek or Nemec to be the NJ top choice -- they both have the potential to be star two-way 1D at the NHL level. But it would be difficult for me to understand wanting any other forward over Slafkovsky. He's pretty much precisely the type of player the Devils need in the top 6, and his upside would be higher than any player in the Devils top 6 save for Jack Hughes.
Numbers for a draft-eligible prospect are what they are. Last year they were used as an argument against Owen Power at #1, and in a redraft he still goes #1. In 2020 the numbers were used to argue against Lucas Raymond and Jake Sanderson at #4/#5, and now they both look like outstanding picks. In 2019, stats arguments were made against Moritz Seider as a 1st round pick, and in a redraft he goes #2 overall after only Jack Hughes. In 2018 stats arguments went against Brady Tkachuk and in 2017 Martin Necas.
The numbers absolutely must be taken into context and weighed in tandem with traditional scouting tools, otherwise you're going to be a pretty poor drafting team. With Slafkovsky, you have an elite passer with elite hands who is nearly unstoppable down low and can play keepaway with the puck against defensemen a decade older. It's not that I'm a "fan" of Slafkovsky, it's that his upside is stratospheric and he'll enter the draft as a consensus top 3 pick. We can say I'm a "fan" of players I'm lauding for the 4th round, sure, but I don't think anyone with half a brain is ranking Slafkovsky outside their top 10.
We can split Slafkovsky's stats into 4 sections this year:
1) Start of year, Finnish Jr: Slafkovsky looked like a threat to break every draft-eligible scoring mark for the league with 18 points in 11 games.
2) Called up to Finnish Liiga: used at a bottom 6 winger and playing for the first time against grown men in a country where he didn't speak the language, Slafkovsky struggled mightily to hit the scoresheet
3) Olympics: Slafkovsky tore up the tournament and deservedly won MVP as best player.
4) End of Finnish season: Slafkovsky was utilized in a middle 6 role from the Olympics on, doubling his point totals in half the games. In the playoffs, he notched 7 points, not eye-popping but still the 3rd-highest total for a draft-eligible in the past two decades.
So, if we're going to use a numbers argument against Juraj Slafkovsky, here's the argument: though he dominated thoroughly in 2 of the 3 major events in which he played, we should not draft him because he did not produce at the highest level in which he played until he was promoted from the bottom 6 into a more consistent scoring line role.
Like him or not, Slafkovsky seems to be a pretty great bet for being picked in the top 3, so for Devils fans it's unlikely to matter anyway unless they win the #2 overall slot at the lottery. The question we need to ask is: how many points would Slafkovsky had scored if he was playing in the QMJHL? And if you watched him in the Olympics or Finnish Juniors or Liiga playoffs as I did, the next question would be if he would have been just above or below the 100-point plateau.
Unfortunately, the context does not allow an air-tight resolution to this statistical conundrum, so we are forced to hypothesize where he is now and where is abilities could allow him to progress and, in essence, that's why we rank prospects in the first place, and why good-drafting teams routinely do it exceptionally.
Well, the Devils did get the most talented #1 overall pick between Matthews and Berard with Jack Hughes, so it's tough to complain.
I get what you’re saying, and yes, every draft pick is based on projections and comes with risk. But just as you mentioned, Nemec is really just my preference at this point.
