Maladroit
Registered User
It’s considerably less guesswork when you’ve scouted the player.
Obviously simply watching the player is largely meaningless, because scouting is more than just watching a player and many people suck at scouting, but I personally don’t like to dismiss a player without having seen them play at least a couple times. Absolutely, you can “all but dismiss” a player based on stats, but every once in a while a player will do something statistically unprecedented. I’m sure William Karlsson was written off by many (including me) as a third liner, tops, due to his stats. But he still did what he did. It may never happen again, but never say never.
It's not like any scout on the planet was predicting William Karlsson would score 40 goals either. In fact the professional scouts employed by the Blue Jackets clearly thought he was a worse player than Josh Anderson and Matt Calvert. I'm not saying scouting is useless but I'm gonna trust the numbers over a scout who, again, admitted he hasn't watched Suomela play.