As someone who heavily watches both nhl and mlb prospects, almost all good prospects are on the path to star-level production ... until they aren’t. Usually AHL in hockey and AA in baseball. It’s how much of their production they retain. And it’s beyond stat-watching and production that is used to predict who can do it.
So Pu and baptiste (and eric locke!) may all have similar production, but it’s tough to say what’s gonna happen next. Hopefully pu can be a middle six scorer but I wouldn’t hope for anything more.
Isn't this a way of agreeing with assessments on why a player succeeds? That is, there's players who excel just from hitting puberty earlier, there's players who get by on speed alone and never have a strong need to pick up the light-skills (stickwork, positioning, etc.), and there's players who have all the light-skills, but not the genes to keep it up against larger humans?
Biggest issue in prospects is trying to separate all of those from each other. Speed is good and great, but like others have mentioned, Baptiste gets lost, doesn't touch the puck all that much, and over-skates the puck too much in the pros and those traits transcended back to his early days.
As far as Pu goes, he's got the little things and those are the things that translate very well when going up in leagues as long as the speed and size doesn't overcome it. Pu isn't tiny or necessarily slow though.
He's going to get dogged because he's a 3rd rounder, not a 2nd rounder. The confirmation bias across scouts is hard to overcome there. It's not like this is an exact science- people get fooled by the size all the damn time in every sport. Martin St Louis was undrafted and he still would be today 9 years out of 10.