Well I don’t think I quite follow you then. I took your post as saying good players don’t take that long to adjust. I inferred that to mean you don’t think Terry and Steel are good players because they are not producing right away. I tried pointing out they aren’t doing that bad considering they were not considered elite talent at their draft.
OK, I'll try to walk through this *once*.
"Good for their draft position" is not the same as "Good." (For the purposes of this conversation, I'll define good as a player who fits comfortably into at least the 2nd line or 2nd pairing on an average playoff team).
If you put me into an NHL game, I'd probably do not bad for a 37-year-old nerd who never played above beer league. Does that mean I'm on track to be a good player in the NHL? No. That's an extreme, but it illustrates the idea": you can be doing "good for a fifth-rounder" or even "good for a late-first-rounder" and still not on pace for being "good."
Someone brought up Hughes and Kakko to show that players don't dominate immediately, and that's true. But Hughes and Kakko are both producing solid numbers as teenagers, which projects them out to being good players, probably great ones.
Troy Terry is 22 and putting up 0.28 ppg in the NHL. That's *very good* for a fifth-rounder, because making the NHL at all as a fifth-rounder is very good, even if it's just one game. But it doesn't put him on track to be a good player. *Most* forwards who are good by the definition I posted above will be doing better than 0.28 PPG at 22.
It's probable that Terry and Steel will get better from where they are now. It's still *possible* that both Terry and Steel could turn into top-6 types, and because of the planning fallacy (
Planning fallacy - Wikipedia), the tendency will be for fans to expect them to turn into those players because it's still possible and optimism reigns. But the median projection from where they are now is mediocrity.
