Hey guys, sorry I didn't see this thread earlier, I've been on the road most of this week (finished off the article a few days ago from my hotel room) and must have missed seeing this thread.
Some explanations:
First off, for every one of these articles, we have an open thread on the staff forum for staff to participate and submit their lists of top 15 rookies. Those results are then averaged out and paired down to the top 10 that form the article. The number of votes depends on the number of writers who participate, but usually I'm working with somewhere around 12 lists each time.
The actual spreadsheet is on my memory stick which is somewhere in my suitcase that I've yet to unpack, but I know both Hall and Shattenkirk were part of the discussions and fell just short.
Speaking for myself, Hall was a guy who I thought was behind Marchand for a couple reasons. The main one was simple winnability. I rank my list with the thought that if Couture wasn't a rookie this year, who would win, if Skinner wasn't and so on. To me, the injury and missing the last quarter of the season knocked Hall down a peg.
Secondly, I don't think the difference in production was that far off. Hall had one more point in eight fewer games, but saw more icetime, especially on the powerplay. Obviously Marchand played for a superior team (Boston scored about 50 goals more than Edmonton), but didn't see the same opportunities that Hall did. We can go back and forth about this, but in the end, I decided it was pretty much a wash.
There was a lot of differing opinions on Marchand and on Hall and the votes just evened out with one over the other. It's interesting, because while the voting period was open, I did raise the question about Hall (and Eberle) and their placement. At the time, I compared their seasons to those of guys like Stepan and Ennis (who I thought might be comparable, injuries notwithstanding). Regarding those guys (maybe less so Eberle), it was just a lot of split votes that put Marchand and Stepan in and left Ennis and Hall out.
That vote splitting had a similar effect with Shattenkirk. He was a guy that was pretty consistently ranked in that 9-12 spot, but was surpassed by other players who were perhaps a bit more polarizing. A player like Bobrovsky and Marchand who were voted anywhere from 5th to 14th averaged out to be higher.
You may not agree with the results, but hopefully this helps explain how we came up with the list.
Thanks for reading!