I'm not gonna be a homer and make any predictions about Parise being top 5 at his position.....but I just wanted to mention that there have been plenty of good NHLers taken in the mid to late first round.
There was a reason why Petr Sykora fell to #18 in 1995 (shoulder injury scared off several teams apparently). In hindsight, I'm pretty sure San Jose, Toronto, and Washington might reconsider their picks.
There was a reason why Brad Richards lasted to the 3rd round in 1998. And it probably would be a good discussion if the bottom 10 first rounders in 1998 are better as a group than the top 10 first rounders that year:
(Regehr, Gagne, Fischer, Gomez, Skoula, Kalinin, Van Ryn, Backman, Kraft, Parker) vs. (Lecavalier, Legwand, Stuart, Allen, Vishnevski, Bell, Antropov, Fata, Malhotra, Rupp)
That's just a couple examples from recent drafts. Yes, for every Iginla and Sakic, there'll be five Jeff Hereema's. But you can't really say "Parise is overrated because everybody had him ranked about #10, and he fell all the way to #17". If you ever make a top 20 list for virtually anything, the gaps between #10 and #20 are probably going to be very slim.
You can possibly make the argument for a guy like Jiri Hudler who was supposed to be a top 10 pick.