I'm not agreeing with anything considering neither Hutston or Casey (who were just 2 examples off the top of my head) have made the NHL and I don't know if their games will translate. What about all the times drafting a pure OFD didn't work...Ryan Merkley, Adam Boqvist, Ty Smith, etc.
How can you say they made a mistake when neither have even played a game in the NHL? All theyve shown so far is what they were showing last year. High scoring junior players cant make the transition to pro all the time.
Sure, now list all of the top defensemen in the league today and how they produced as Junior age scorers.
They would certainly go higher in the draft today than they did in June. We don’t need a prospect’s entire career to play out before we can access decision making. If so just shut this board down.
Boqvist was a weird miss. Man, I thought he'd develop better. Smith and Merkley both had significant issues. Neither of them were elite at anything, but offensive awareness and a smooth skating ability. They were both under 5'11" and played the game like they were 5'7". Both got outmuscled often. Smith could still pan out an NHL career.
But Jiricek IS better than L. Hughes and it is not even close. Its easy to have shitty advanced stats on playoff team with superstars, it is very hard to have best defensive impact on bottom feeder team like Columbus. Look also at Nemec for example, yikes! NJ prospects are overrated with huge holes in their game. I would rather have big two way beasts like Weber or Seider than two Josh Baileys as my top pair guys.
Look at Andrew Cristall, Jordan Dumais, Lane Hutson, Jagger Firkus, Lukas Dragicevic or William Villeneuve amd where they were drafted, all put up amazing draft years for their respected teams and none were drafted inside the top-32.Only a sport like hockey can take an impressive feat like a defenseman leading his team in scoring as a draft eligible and turn it into an actual negative. It’s amazing.
I don't even know what you are arguing at this point. Most of the guys you named have already outperformed their draft position, or will shortly.
There's more to being a good prospect than scoring in juniors. People keep telling you that, and you're ignoring all the other flaws in these players games. No one is or has been questioning the offensive capabilities of Parekh, Cristall, Hutson, etc. etc. We're questioning the defensive play....the skating...the decision making...whatever it is. They all have some attribute(s) that kept them from being drafted in the first round (or highly in the first).
Instead of me rambling again, why don't you think his style of play would work in the NHL?
No one is saying those players don’t have flaws. There are almost no draft prospects who don’t have elements to their game that need further development, including supposedly more “well-rounded” players. Not scoring at a prolific level in juniors is indicative of a flaw when you’re grading players against each other. The question is why do the flaws you cite take priority over the flaws that the well-rounded but less-prolific players have?
And if that’s what you get, I think that’s worth a top 10 pick. But it’s not that likely, which is why I wouldn’t pick him top 10. Top 20 or 25 is more palatable to me.
Not yet. How could you argue that yet? Neither has reached the NHL.
So when you put together your draft list every year you just do it once and publish it and wait to see if they make it to the NHL to determine if you were right or not? No self reflection in between? Because that's essentially what you are arguing. That is a bad process.
Yeah, I don’t understand how he does it - but he is the best goal scoring defender I have seen in a long time.
