Perunovich has the highest potential of our prospects outside of our goalies. Given the lack of sure fire, top-end guys, he is my pick. He could bust but let’s be honest, there isn’t a prospect here who couldn’t relative to their ceilings. If picking Perunovich is taking a risk, so is picking any other guy on the list.
Honestly these rankings are going to be skewed towards familiarity bias for two reasons. First, we just had the haze of COVID cloud everyone’s assessment of prospects, both draft eligible and already drafted. There were less viewings across the board. Draft consensus was weak, as was this supposed draft class. Assessing already drafted prospects is the same. Some guys played, some more than others, and some not at all. That skews assessments toward guys who played. They could either move up or down your rankings. Guys who didn’t play stayed in neutral. I would wager that guys who played well at some point last year will have a disproportionate skew in their favor as we couldn’t compare that against the rest of the pool at what they would have done if they played.
Second, because there is such limited viewership of the newly drafted players and because we are doing rankings so soon after the draft, many will not have had time to perform their due diligence. I personally have not and it will undoubtedly poison this round of ranking for me. In one or two months time my list will look different more so then any other year. Once we see players this year that list will solidify more than it has in the past.
On the matter of goalies, we have two guys in Ellis and Hofer who are charting comparable paths as Allen and Binnington. Those two may end up some of our most valued players coming out of this pool. They should absolutely be in the 2nd tier conversation after Kostin and Perunovich. They probably should even be in the conversation with Kostin and Perunovich for top prospects. The Blues are building depth in the pool, but this reads a lot like the Ratty, Jaskin and Binnington years. Binnington is clearly the most valuable guy of the bunch and he was not rated as high as them year over year. We could say similar things with Allen and Bishop. Yet I hear goalies are hard to judge. Well clearly all players are hard to judge too. We just conveniently leave that part out for some reason. Maybe it’s just to make creating these lists easier and so we can avoid more ego hit when we are wrong. Dunno?