A scout knows what he is looking at and what he is looking for. Pronman is a journalism major that watches hockey games
And by your definition, anyone that has ever watched a hockey game qualifies as a scout. That would make your definition pretty much useless.From your definition he might be a bad scout, but a bad scout is still a scout.
And that's what he's paid to be. Pronman isn't the problem. The problem are the people that think there's any substance to his opinions.He's an opinion columnist at best.
it was clearly explained.
It’s a 2016 and under draft eligible list. ranks the best players from the last 5 draft classes.
Matthews was a late birthday. Like players like Tavares/eichel/Mario.
Heck 5 years from now laf will be on the 23 and under list at 23
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't notice he used the draft dates.
Most lists of this nature, that I have seen, tend to use birth year, not draft year for the age cut off.
Example: top 25 under 25 list has no players aged 25.
It's a bad list but in Pronman's defense, I think some of these responses are not taking age into account.
Hahahahaha careful the agenda is showing!Why is Heiskanen as the #1 crazy? He arguably had the greatest playoff performance by a u23 defenceman ever and has zero flaws in his game.
I think the #1 and #2 spots are between Heiskanen and Pettersson and it comes down to preference. Both are extremely high IQ, which I value a lot, and both will win championships in this league.
If you're worried about Matthews, he lacks the IQ and ability to make linemates better to challenge for #1.
Alarming to say the leastCorey Pronman of the Athletic ranks his top U-23 players.
This is a projection on who he believes will have the best careers. It’s actually 155 players in total, but I’ll just post the top-25 here to discuss.
- Auston Matthews
- Rasmus Dahlin
- Elias Pettersson
- Alexis Lafreniere
- Matthew Tkachuk
- Andrei Svechnikov
- Patrick Laine
- Jack Hughes
- Kaapo Kakko
- Quinton Byfield
- Quinn Hughes
- Brady Tkachuk
- Cale Makar
- Miro Heiskanen
- Tim Stutzle
- Kirby Dach
- Lucas Raymond
- Pierre Luc-Dubois
- Cole Perfetti
- Robert Thomas
- Nico Hischier
- Milhail Sergachev
- Trevor Zegras
- Charlie McAvoy
- Barrett Hayton
Id take all those defenseman going forward over McAvoy in a heart beat. Your issue should be Serg ahead of him.2. Dahlin
11. Q. Hughes
13. Makar
14. Heiskanen
24. McAvoy
What have we been watching?
Not the point of my criticism.I've never been a Pronman fan but man are there ever some wildly off-base criticisms here. He's really pissed some people off by ranking their favorite player low or something.
Hell, by that definition every one of us is a scout. [Ken Dryden reference goes here.] The question is whether he's significantly better than the average scout. That bar should be higher than "better than 50% of the population." Probably also higher than "better than 51% of the population" or "better than 52% of the population" or ... ranking somewhere into the top-quarter might be a good threshold. I might settle for top-third.He is a scout. There is no doctoral degree for scouting, you just watch and evaluate hockey players, that's all.
1. I have no doubt he could get hired by an organization if he wanted to.I bet Pronman could get hired by an org if he wanted to go that route, but having never worked inside an org before, he'd have to start low and work his way up, and that would be a paycut and loss of status from working for TheAthletic.
You've completely missed the point here and committed the same error I point out when you talk about the hits Pronman has while ignoring his misses. Congrats.You can't find an NHL team that was willing to take Kucherov higher than where Pronman would have taken him, that's the end of the debate.
Grigorenko was not #2 quality, but I wouldn't be so sure that he wouldn't go in the 1st round, that whole draft was abysmal and relatively devoid of talent. He had Forsberg much higher (good) and I don't know why you'd think Galchenyuk would be especially prized in a re-draft.
Everyone including Yzerman, Jarmo, or whoever else you think is a draft-wiz, has tons of misses. It's just about doing relatively well, and if Pronman really would have drafted Kucherov, Point, Barzal, Aho, etc.. then you have to think he's doing at least average.
Hell, by that definition every one of us is a scout. [Ken Dryden reference goes here.] The question is whether he's significantly better than the average scout. That bar should be higher than "better than 50% of the population." Probably also higher than "better than 51% of the population" or "better than 52% of the population" or ... ranking somewhere into the top-quarter might be a good threshold. I might settle for top-third.
One can have great insights and lots of good observations, and still draw poor conclusions. The question isn't about watching and evaluating and expressing thoughts. It's about being able to accurately rank guys, and my question still stands: is he significantly better at doing this than others who also do the same work and get a fraction of the fanfare? Or, is he basically as hit-and-miss as anyone else but his hits get lots of attention while his misses get quietly swept under the rug?
1. I have no doubt he could get hired by an organization if he wanted to.
2. If you really think he'd have to start low and work up, I've got bad news for you on how organizations make hiring decisions when it comes to people who have name recognition.
3. HFBoards doesn't have enough bandwidth, and I don't have nearly the time, for me to go through the list of people who've been hired as supposed experts on [topic], who got hired with great fanfare, and proceeded to show they were totally clueless and crashed out in flames. Most of them went on to get a 2nd, 3rd, 4th chance elsewhere because someone was still convinced the people before them had it all wrong. I really don't have time to go through all the times people have misunderstand analytics and still landed jobs because they had some website or some service that spouted a bunch of fancy-looking data and someone in an organization said wow, that looks really impressive, we gotta have them here! Meanwhile, there are several much more significant items to both team and individual performance that could (should) be investigated, and no one is even scratching the surface on them.
Short: if the tag "they're significantly above average" is going to be affixed to someone, I expect to see tangible proof of it - not a bunch of conjecture and appeals to authority and populism.
You've completely missed the point here and committed the same error I point out when you talk about the hits Pronman has while ignoring his misses. Congrats.
I'm pretty confident you don't have the first clue what I think or how I feel. Don't ever try pretending you do."Congrats"? I think your blood sugar might have dipped on you here.
And then proceeded to talk about instances where Pronman rated guys higher than someone picked them and that player went on to be great, while failing to note instances where Pronman rated guys as high or higher than teams picked the player and the player went on to crap out. That's ... kind of critical to my point, which you didn't reiterate. Hence, congrats on continuing to argue one side.You mostly reiterated the same points that I was making - that scouting is measured in how well someone does in relative terms.
This is an awesome straw man point. I say it's a straw man, because you addressed something other than the question I raise: whether Pronman's rankings are a more accurate representation of what those prospects will go on to do than anyone else's, or if all the hits are offset by all the misses and he's really no more accurate than the average ranking of all people doing prospect rankings. If you want to discuss whether GMs - more accurately the scouting departments that work under those GMs - are better/worse at evaluating prospects, kick off that thread and we can all opine there, but IMO it's irrelevant to the topic at hand.Though I'm not sure if we've yet understood each other when it comes to "misses". To my mind, if a GM selects Kucherov, Point, Barzal, and Aho in the span of six years, then they've already done quite well whether they have ten misses or fourty. You don't need to count misses. That is a very easy group to build a winner around. Colorado for example has drafted terribly except for that group of four first rounders - Landeskog 2011, Mackinnon 2013, Rantanen 2015, and Makar 2017. Nearly every other pick in that span was poor. But once you have that much elite talent you can build a contender around them through trades and signings.