I could see Knight turning into the best player in this draft. Goalies don't get drafted in the top 10 anymore, but I think if you try to analyze which players in this draft have the most potential for their position and are the current best for their position, Knight would be top five. If you look back to the 2012 draft, Vasilevskiy was the best player in that draft class at the time of the draft, and had the highest potential. It was a weak draft of skaters with a generational goalie prospect. He's turned into the best player in the draft. I don't think Knight is as good as Vasilevskiy was, but I do think he has one of the better chances in this draft to end up as the best player.
I don't think Knight has had as good of a season as some of us expected. I thought he was bad a few months ago when he played Russia, and yesterday against Russia he wasn't great either. But thats assessing based on expectations. Against junior hockey players, his "bad" performances are average performances for other players. He's beyond this level of hockey. He hasn't quite lived up to the enormous expectations for this season, but some of that may be unfair. He didn't get a real shot to be the starter at the World Juniors, and while his stats aren't as good as his teammates at their position, a lot of that has to do with facing little traffic and a lot of high danger shots. He's had a few questionable games this season against Russia, but thats about as much as you could criticize the guy.
The way I see it, he's the best goalie prospect we've had. Aside from Gibson, we are lacking in top 10 caliber NHL goalies, so we need this guy to come good more than we need Hughes, Turcotte, Zegras, Caufield, Boldy to come good.
