Uhm, who made the “only four d-men allowed in the top-10 rule”? Not to mention that Hughes has looked horrific at the WJC and that means a lot to scouts.
In the last 21 drafts there has been exactly one draft with more than four d-men in the top 10. That means that more than four defensemen are taken in the top 10 in 4.76% of the time. So is it a hard and fast rule? No, but if something occurs over 95% of the time then most would consider that high enough confidence to best characterize a situation. This, not because it would prohibitively produce the expected result, but because a characterization of the situation where one includes the 5th defensemen would yield far more false positives than the chosen standard would yield false negatives. "Ok, well I want to be difficult, what if this year is that 4.76%." Sure, that's not impossible. It's unlikely, the majority of credible 2018 mock drafts still do not have such a number. But ok, we'll accept that it's a possibility. I thought of making my first post much longer than it was, but I left out the next category after "prohibitive", which was "wide consensus". Athletes almost universally recognized to be better than Merkley. I had 4 in that category, but I didn't think you were foolish enough to challenge the top 4 and I figured you had the common sense to accept historical precedent. Ok, you're not, so let's hear the next four. They were Dobson, Woo, McIsaac and Wilde. Let's just assume, for grins and giggles, that we're taking 5 D in the top 10. He would then have to be better than not one, but all of them. In the world of credible scouts and scouting services you know who that is a popular opinion among? No one to my knowledge.
On Merkley, I think he’s become one of the players who are commonly expected to be **** on, but ever since late November, he has been significantly better defensively, and you can’t discount his remarkable offensive abilities. Will be interesting to see wher he is drafted.
Yes, he is. Because for every 5 people who say "I see him play all the time, he doesn't do this well, doesn't do that well" there's still one vocal individual who keeps saying "I looked at his stats on paper recently and woah he should totally be a top 10 pick." I don't think anyone would say anything bad about him if it was universally accepted that he was a solid 20-30 pick.