I struggle to justify your extreme bullishness. I want Tracey to succeed too. But I cannot agree with you on your high cieling/guarenteed NHLer assessment.
19 year old players with a high cieling and a worst case floor of middle 6 NHLER are either dominating their current league or are already in the NHL.
Thats quite a fallacious assumption. And thats just not true across the board. Sure, there are some that do take the path you suggested. But that’s just one of many paths. Tracey is so young. He just turned 20 at the end of May.
Expecting him or most any prospect to be “dominating their current league” or “already in the NHL” is ludicrous. There’s some confirmation bias and sample bias growing strong in this thread.
Some prospects don’t even break out until their like 25. Those are late bloomers. 19 year old, still a teenage prospect. And only a very small percentage “dominate” adult leagues, which include the AHL. A league he only played 12 games in.
And he was over a PPG every WHL season, until this pandemic season, where he played just 22 games and got 21 points. Basically a PPG in a year where who knows what was going on in his life. Better players have had slumps longer than that. There’s nothing here to worry about yet except lofty expectations and wacky assertions with no baring in tihe real world. For every one prospect that “dominates” their first year playing against adults there’s probably 10 equally talented players who don’t. And those players often do become terrific nhl players eventually.
Also, his WHL team this year was the worst in the league. Last year he played half the season for another terrible team and half the year for a decent team and was still over PPG.
