goteam said:
No love for Brule or Setoguchi, Bob?
For the record, none of this is based on MY personal opinion. It is a consensus ranking after talking to scouts representing 10 NHL teams. It is not the same as ISS or Red Line, which make their own subjective evaluations of the players and rate them accordingly. I have never suggested my rankings were anything beyond that.
Having said that, this exercise, which I started when I founded The Hockey News Draft Preview back in the mid-80s has proven to be a very good barometer of where players are usually taken. It's far from foolproof, of course, as it takes only one NHL team to like a prospect and skew the "consensus" but I would say without doing the math, the batting average of who's a top 10 pick, who's a 10-20 and who's a 20-30 is pretty good, if I do say so myself.
It's funny, really, how quickly players fall into slots or numerical categories after talking to only a handful of scouts. At the end of the day, it's just more fodder for us draft junkies who really should have gone out and gotten a life at some point.
And as for the poster who can't believe NHL team scouts would actually tell me what they really think and where they have players rated, well, all I can say is they do (and it's a good thing, too) and it's probably because we have a strong bond of trust that dates back in many cases 15 to 25 years. To tell you the truth, my entire livelihood is based on people telling me things they ought not to.